Christmas Special 2016
by KING FELIX
Summary: Channel Four made some attention-skavs read this story for a Gogglebox Christmas Special. They thought it was a metaphor for Brexit, Trumpy or the apocalyptic class war that only I think is happening. Yeah, but also Swindon Town continues to get stuffed.


Christmas Special 2016

'A man belongs to his own country forever'.

-Picasso.

'One sapper, one axe, one day, one stump'.

-Soviet proverb.

When a murderous prison camp in mid-April starts to sound like Christmas party, there is something seriously wrong with the world. All the same, it's the clearest memory I have about how that longest, most evil section of my life actually started. A few bars of 'Merry Christmas Everyone' by Shakin' Stevens woke us from deep sleep; my cellmate and I staring at each other as if we could make the slightest sense of it. Maybe it was just randomly-chosen previews from a folder of yuletide hits in someone's MP3 player, since it certainly didn't sound like it was being consciously chosen by anyone. To a man, our captors had no concept of humanity, still less peace or civility. We heard 'Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree', 'I'm Dreaming of a White Christmas', 'Silent Night' –about ten seconds of each. Inevitably we heard 'Here It Is, Merry Christmas' by Slade, followed by 'The Snowman' theme.

For whatever reason, the music eventually died. A little while later, the guards came to drag Tom from our make-shift cell and I was left alone with my thoughts, just slightly more puzzled than usual. I waited and waited.

At the start of the civil war in 2020, I'd been working as a lorry driver delivering heavy duty electrical equipment to industrial yards. Back when the CRG were still just committing random terrorist acts, I'd never had too much to worry about. When things escalated, there'd been the heft of the Martial Transportation Act to deal with: military checkpoints, so much documentation, government tachometers. If only they'd achieved anything when it came to actually protecting us; I'd pulled into Whitedowns Telecom Tower at more or less the precise moment it was being overrun by CRG guerrillas, immediately getting thrown into an ad-hoc cell and forgotten about. My cellmate Tom was a big, grizzled man, who I immediately grew to love. He took one look at me and said, 'Are you a plant?' I hadn't understood at all. I thought his ordeal had driven him mad and he was seeing me as some kind of sci-fi roots-and-leaves monster.

Which is as ironic as you can get.

What he meant, of course, was I one of the guerrillas, merely disguised as a fellow prisoner in order to get comradely information? Certainly it was a feasible. The CRG were intensely clever. Our getting caught at Whitedowns coincided with an almost nationwide campaign of annexing key infrastructures -internet server compounds, food supply depots, hospitals. Several power stations had fallen to them, and we later heard reports that renegade engineers had distilled nuclear material into dirty bombs in order to defend their new territories.

It was bleak in our cell. I stared at the breezeblock walls with their generations of lavender paint, wondering about my girlfriend Vichelle all those miles away. Wandering what was happening to Tom, as well. The heavy-set door was locked fast with only the faintest footsteps beyond. This leant itself to reaching out with my mind, my ears, my imagination, combining to make a funny psychic picture of the outlying electrical stations.

Somewhere, a level or so above, they were torturing my friend in the most cruel and unusual way. At the same time, they were torturing a woman, making her hiss and gasp. I'd seen it in numerous War-on-Terror films; the best way to unhinge someone's mind is to set up some speakers and mix just a few seconds stark silence with screaming death-metal, or sometimes just screaming. In one film, they'd left an insurgent alone with it all night and in the morning, he'd squealed like a baby.

But this was different. It seemed more sadistic. The Christmas tunes we'd woken up to returned in full force, ten second bursts of several different melodies at once, overlapping in such a weird and cacophonous way. The sound was co-ordinated _just_ enough that you could distinguish individual pieces, tho this was far from a good thing. Things like Wizard and The Waitresses would forever be tainted.

There were no clocks in our cell, though for sure the experience was stretched into hours. I could have wrapped some clothes around my head and been delivered from it, but I forced myself to share their pain as much as I could. God knew how unbearable it must be directly alongside those huge speakers.

Promotional wallcharts and calendars from subsidiaries were placed at artful spaces along the pitted walls, glossy paper no longer glossy and the lamination hardened like wood glue. Some misty Arthurian hills and a colourful Lake District quayside were in prime place. It was all so beautiful considering they were just public domain cliparts selected to sit above shipping charts. A mountainside of gorse mesmerised me quite a bit, the way the brown-red leaves looked dead but on deeper reflection were thriving, hungrily swallowing up the pretty hilltop.

The dovetailing of 'Don't Let the Bells End' and 'The Power of Love' created such a fearful sound, before giving way to eerie silence. Tom was returned. He was shakey and I straight away fell forwards to support his huge old body. The guards retreated, hardly caring about any of it, least of all locking the chamber door behind them. In the lead was the curly-haired man with an expression that, under any other circumstances, would have been boy-next-door friendly.

"I heard what happened. They're b-!"

Said Tom, "No, no. I'm alright so far".

But the bravery in his voice was far too subtle, like someone on a terminal illness ward. I made a fuss of making him settle down on his back until his composure returned. I've always believed in giving people space to deal with their own problems. Until here and now.

Slyly, he said, "I think I just need to put it out of my head".

Watching him, tensed and haunched-up on his forearms, I wasn't nearly so convinced. They were tree trunks, tattooed like a sailor, and should never have been in a position where they crept with fear.

"They were torturing you. I don't know much about psychology, but I know it's not good to pretend it just didn't happen".

Eventually, dryly, "No. It wasn't torture exactly".

He saw me blinking, and explained further, "They expect to win the war, but they're not _certain_ of it. They're playing the long game and I think –we're being brainwashed".

I struggled to understand. Maybe I was just being stupid. But Tom had regained his composure enough to hold court. "It's psychological programming, We're intended to be sleeper agents. The Christmas music –they're conditioning us to associate it with pain. And the only way to relieve that pain is to commit random murder. They're assuming that one day we'll be back in our ordinary lives, and we'll hear one of those melodies and the programming will kick in. We'll start to do their job for them. Kill indiscriminately".

"That's very far-fetched", I blustered.

A strange silence followed and for some reason I felt ill -intensely tired. I had no idea how things would resolve, until the chamber door clunked and vibrated to let the guards fan out between us. Clearly it was my turn now, the well-fed hands manhandling body parts that already felt numb and defenceless. Why I felt so fatigued all of a sudden was a complete mystery.

I was pulled away, and Tom said just one thing, "Don't do it. Hold out, or don't hold out. But don't do what they want".

In the space outside of our cell, in all the reinforced walkways beyond, a lot of the rooms were like curved lighthouse quarters. Even if I'd been able to disentangle myself, there wasn't nearly enough open ground to pick up speed and escape. Steep metal steps arose beside the jarring emanations of machines several floors away, and I was left with just enough calmness to brood on things. I was like a child, certainly, but at the same time, with a child's resilience. They'd not succeed with any brainwashing. Not on me. Also, in my relationship with Vichelle back home, I'd always been fragile -in a weird way, I thought this experience would validate me, make me stronger.

The chamber I ended up in was a reconditioned workshop, crowded out with man-size reels of cable on great big hoists. Prominently, a kind of hermetic screen sat between the big speakers. It had two rubbery slots through which a technician could safely handle dangerous or fragile items, now appropriated by our captors as torture chamber stocks –they pulled my arms through and handcuffed them on the other side.

I waited, not asking for mercy, but at the same time not making things worse for myself. 'Leave your body' was a trope often used by survivors of torture and confinement. This seemed like such a tall order to me. My girlfriend Vichelle often claimed to have had out-of-body experiences, suddenly finding herself floating six feet above her sleeping body, or completely removed in a different room altogether. But upon noticing this, she'd immediately panic and snap back into her physical body, for fear of becoming separated forever.

But how I dearly wanted to escape now, by any means. When you're a long-distance HGV driver, you soon become accustomed to that funny coincidence, when a few words being spoken on the radio suddenly reflects _exactly_ what you've seen on the side of the motorway, or something you're thinking about in your exhausted mind. It's a strange little phenomenon that happens when you spend twelve hours a day listening to a talk network. You tell yourself, there's nothing really supernatural about it -it's only natural that things synch-up every now and again.

Only -still your goosebumps rise. I felt it now, too; one of my captors was speaking to me, though it may or may not have been fateful, profound, miraculous.

"I'm here to set you free. All you have to do is listen and act".

On the other side of the transparent screen, a beleaguered-looking woman was pushed into an awkward position directly in front of me. We were both gaffa-taped to rickety plastic chairs, close enough that we could have embraced if the screen hadn't been there. As the Brainwasher Chief spoke to us, I regarded her big thoughtful lips as they parted, never quite exhaled..

"This is Katy Bright. She's part of NASA's research team to open a wormhole to Proxima B and save us all when the sun burns out".

I noticed the confusion which flickered in the woman's eyes.

But continued our captor, "Only joking. She's part of a scuzzy criminal gang that scams pensioners –though no one knows this. Not the police. Not the people at the welfare office, where she goes to claim for her six kids, which she had tactically by three different men, to avoid ever doing a day's work".

At any point, the woman could have spoken up. Bravery could easily have won out over crafty silence. But she remained utterly still, eyes breezing out an acknowledgement that the scamming of the pensioners and the welfare-blitzing really was true. What of it?

The Brainwasher Chief stepped clear, paced around, pretended to talk to no one in particular. "The human race is evil. People are greedy far beyond the point of self-awareness and sanity. No one ever notices until it's too late. You start to get conceited, like everyone else, and we all go directly to hell. That part of your brain that always tells you to be safe, to trust in things. It's a monster. Cloying you. Suffocating you".

It was so much like a dream, this strange situation. I was deathly tired, but still the man's words were etched into my understanding, deeper than phonetics, something like pure information.

Close to my ear now, "You're going to be left here forever. But there is a way out".

He walked to the other side of the screen where my hands were cuffed. He took my fingers and placed them loosely on the throat of Katy Bright, or whoever she might _really_ be.

"Do what needs to be done, and we'll free you. This thing is just -evil. Evil that exists simply because no one ever challenges it. Kill it. Strangle it –and you'll be free".

Perhaps he said this to me just once, or dozens of times. Either way it was profoundly impressed on my brain as the whole terrible business began. Ten seconds of choirboys singing 'Silent Night', mixed with Noddy Holder screaming, mixed with George Michael crooning, 'December Song'. I had the memory of Tom saying 'Hold out, or don't hold out', now mingled with all the psychopathic words of my captor -eventually giving way to my own little tactics and strategies about how to survive.

The blaring sound was perhaps not the real source of the torture. On its own, and if it had been continuous, the atonal mixing of tunes might just about have been bearable. Instead, it was the tension which was stirred up during those moments of stark silence. You couldn't fail to think, 'Perhaps that's the end?' But it never was.

At one point, while I was bouncing around an endless loop of those beautiful choir songs and indispensable pop hits, I had the brainwave that maybe I could disarm the whole thing by immediately _thinking_ about the noise as soon as the silence started, so robbing it of its murderous tension. This worked for a time. My head became like a single block of strange instrumentation, like Ornette Coleman jazz with a Christmas theme.

Then the phantoms set in. Any section of the melodies that were remotely high-pitched or sonorous became a scream or a moan. Sometimes my fingers felt around for a way to remove themselves from the girl's throat. Other times they luxuriated on the heavy, soft rhythm of her pulse, and there was no denying that the intimacy, the high tension, the rapid switching from high to low brain function, made it sexual. Lights flashed on and off like the nightclubs I'd been to as a younger man, giving the world a nightmarish buzz.

Soon, the heaving squeeze box and quack-voice of Bob Dylan 'Must be Santa' became properly unbearable. At the same time, it combined with the tumbling piano of Wizard, Kate Bush hitching her voice in 'December Will Be Magic Again', all to bring a sense of rushing finality. I knew that, eventually, my ability to think straight would simply vanish inside the brainwave-altering rhythms -I _would_ strangle her. Maybe I had an hour or two, maybe I had the rest of my life, but it _would_ happen.

Obviously designed by a clever psychologist, the torture was delicately stage-managed to ruin me on the most fundamental, subconscious level. Thoughts of, 'This feels like it will last for an eternity' became, 'This _has_ lasted for an eternity. I am fighting all eternity, and it is evil'.

Conscious thought vanished into a tightly wound spring. It had to. It was a luxury. My mind became a single point, the simple command to hold out from second to second.

The music shut down, though it took me some time to establish this for sure. The woman was freed from her bindings and dragged away. I felt strangely hollow. Pretty polarised, too. Somehow, I must have made a bad job of co-operating as the guards knifed my binds off, because they took this as an excuse to beat me, childishly around the shoulders, then in the abdomen. Gasping, I doubled-up as a kind of abstract model of a man, confused because once you've conclusively winded someone, what's the point of repeating the blows?

Back at the cell, I stared at the promotional wallchart of the pretty hilltop being swallowed by gorse. Tom spoke; I simply listened.

"We'll be OK. We'll get through this".

"Yes", spoken like a shrug.

Good comradeship dictated I should say something more constructive, and so, "I can see how someone would lose their minds to it, but I can hold out. I've only had the one session. Stands to reason, it will only get more bearable".

Tom was horrified by this. He informed me that I'd just had my _sixth_ session.

Tx.

We woke next, not to blaring Christmas music, but to a strange commotion on the lower levels. What I took to be a Hercules was making a close pass over our tower, brazenly playing up the all-powerful engines against our delicate aluminium walls. Several pieces of monitoring equipment got dislodged, shock-and-awing our minds with the excitement that we were about to be rescued.

A very long time passed, however.

Muffled, indistinct shouts mixed with gunfire, some automatic, some which could easily have been stray sniper blasts. All were close range, conjuring the vibe of a bizarrely close OK Corral. Tom and I reached a hurried consensus that we had no option but to put up our hands and surrender as soon as the chamber door swung open; it would either be the guards coming to liquidise us, or else our liberators, who'd easily mistake us for the enemy if we weren't careful.

Five minutes later, the firefight trailed off into an eerie silence, which carried on for an equally eerie stretch of petrified waiting. I wondered, quite naturally, if this was some cosmic rebalancing to cancel out all those hours we must have spent listening to the torture-music. For sure, the long period of muted inactivity hinted that there would be _no_ sudden entrance into our cell, no assault by trigger-happy soldiers. Probably, our captors were either treating their wounds, debriefing the battle, or else tied up restocking their ammo. But the liberation force had clearly faded to nothing.

The little wallchart with the gorse-strewn mountain. I settled back, screaming inside, feeling that it was a tiny window right at my elbow. Mountains and deep-clinging foliage –such an old-fashioned sight. Hard to say exactly _how_ I was mesmerised -because those mountains represented partitions between our war-torn counties, or just regional punctuation marks to understand the drama?

We'd taken to standing either side of the chamber door, maybe unwisely. When it finally burst open, we had no idea what was happening.

"Stand up!"

We were already standing up.

"Where are you?", the guard loosely and clumsily fired his gun into the recesses.

I took in the exact variety of panic that was fluttering in his eyes. Something had turned him completely blind, ditto the two further guards who clambered at his back.

Tom and I looked at each other. I grasped up a pillow and threw it into one corner as a kind of decoy. The lead man advanced, and we made a half-clever job of bundling past his rearguard. The last man turned and grasped my elbow in a horrible, vice-like claw; Tom delivered me by stamping on the back of his leg. Further echoes of desperate, clumsy gunfire sounded as we raced down the stairs, to a billet room that was filled with sheer panic and confusion. Three more blinded guerrillas were swirling slowly, making desperate plans that always came to nothing. One shouted that they needed to secure their weapons and logbooks, another insisted that they should immediately surrender.

"Surrender to who?", asked his comrade desperately.

Now this made me shudder. I'd assumed that we were _at least_ under siege by a liberation force, that they'd deployed some kind of futuristic flashbang that had blinded their enemy while they moved in. But it had been ages since the gun battle. What if the other side had used some kind of airborne, biological thing, and we were next to be blinded?

From a grey, dank corner, Tom said to me, "We can't hang around here".

"We need to find out what's happening, or whatever blinded them could get us. And I've no desire to have to get a job as a Sunderland centre-forward".

It was the over-excitement that put such a bad joke in my mouth, but luckily, Tom neither laughed or told me off. We ducked through gantries until we eventually reached a series of anterooms and some daylight.

A blind man hovered at the extremity, both palms on the breadth of the wall, aware of his approximate location between the outside world and the main rooms -still deeply unsure about where to go for the best. There was much activity in the outer bay; the indecisive man called out to whoever was around the corner. Tom and I tip-toed around him. Fast approaching was a mode of being where action-adrenaline was easily overpowering the unspeakably depressing things we saw around every bend. Almost.

Our old friend, the chief captor who'd said all the 'humanity is evil' stuff, had somehow managed to cable-tie himself to the girl-prisoner, who'd retained her sight the same as us. He held a Whalter-style handgun roughly to her abdomen.

"I told you to look outside! Keep telling me what's happening!"

The girl didn't obey. She simply glared at us.

Tom waved for my attention, then illustrated his plan. He motioned for me to crick his gun arm away in a highly kinetic snap, then mimed upper-cutting our enemy in the belly. Realising the whole ballet was primed on my mark, I simply got on with it before our prey could deliver another John Lithgow exclamation.

Obviously, his elbow was tense; it was inevitable a shot would be fired. It connected with no one, however. We successfully reduced him to sagging wreck while Tom teased off the cable-tie.

The girl immediately fled from the bay and we never saw her again.

"What's happening here?", Tom asked with slightly theatrical exhaustion.

"Go and find out yourself", sneered the mighty-fallen.

Tom looked around the racking and returned with a huge pair of pliers. He placed them in the man's mouth.

"All those songs you played us, but you missed out my favourite: 'All I want for Christmas is my two front teeth'".

He removed the pincers in case the man felt inclined to talk, and indeed he did. The pupils of his sightless eyes stared dead ahead, with a delicacy that almost made him innocent. I felt sorry for him even in spite of the enmity.

Telling how one of their look-outs had raised the alert of an incoming plane from the North. They'd known it wasn't going to drop assault troops; it was far too low. They'd panicked that the pilot was making a suicide run, but it wasn't this, either. The militia in the tower could hardly see it from their angle, but the plane must have had its cargo bay open all along –to drop three huge containers directly in the open. They looked like regular shipping containers only modified with heavy-duty bumpers.

"Well, what would _you_ have thought?", our blinded prisoner demanded of us. They'd assumed the plane had been captured by a fellow CRG gang and this was some sort of ad-hoc supply drop.

"After all, the use of Agent K across all our places in the North meant that we no longer had a way to radio them to check".

Tom urgently halted him to ask what 'Agent K' was. It was something neither of us had heard of before, tho clearly a big factor in the lives of the CRG; his blind eyes examined the whole of the deep, ironic universe we plebeians lived in. He smiled.

The Northern Army, in their attempts to overwhelm the guerrilla strongholds, had fired missiles into the atmosphere. The vaporous contents dispersed in the cloud cover, causing a chemical reaction which rained down on their compounds. In any case, it was a highly sophisticated kind of chemical warfare; the rain hissed everywhere, releasing still more vapour, which interestingly only vaguely irritated their skin. What it did, however, was seep inside their machinery and corrode the circuitry. From the outside, their cars, radios, mounted weapons -all looked the same as ever. When they were opened up, even the circuitry didn't look too bad -except for a strange white furring along the capacitor strands. Dead.

Tom said, "And what was in the containers? More of this corrosive stuff?"

Our prisoner's smiling ceased. "You idiots. What's happening now is the age of warfare by smart-chemicals. They've only just scratched the surface".

And, yes, how right he was. Our society had spent the last three decades hyping up the lethality of some dusty Arab insurgents who'd cobbled together some bombs and automatic guns, never imagining that the real threat to civilisation might come from our own university-graduates, who were allowed to design exotic new weapons with the full weight of too-much-time-on-your-hands technology.

The order had been given to approach the containers across the hundred metres of open ground, still assuming it would be a waste of resources if they were merely a trap, set to explode and kill so few of their number. Three valuable shipping containers just to kill a few random enemy fighters who'd been sent to reconnoitre?

"It had to have been a supply drop, that's what we thought", he said, almost tearful with regret. They'd dutifully sent a single man to investigate -all eyes on the containers, including multiple snipers.

The first thing he'd reported was a strange 'ticking' noise emanating from each of the units. It sounded, he insisted, like a cross between a metal tape measure being allowed to twang on the floor and the brittle vibrations of a Slinky travelling down wooden stairs. Certainly it was structured, though. For one thing, the volume and frequency at which the sounds reverberated reacted strongly to his increasing proximity, almost like echo-location.

At the last possible moment, there was indeed an explosion, tho one could hardly call it violent. The direct source wasn't visible, but the aftermath?

"It was like a thousand fireworks all super-imposed on each other. Only they didn't fade or disperse as they drifted through the air. Anyone who was looking at them, and that was _everybody_ , found that they were unable to look away. Soon, anyone who was looking upwards at the sky became totally blind".

Men had wailed and gasped as they'd staggered across the plain. Our friend the torturer had settled back within the tower and tried so hard to fit what he was hearing into a cogent vision. Unavailable, since there was also this to consider: the ticking noise sometimes grew louder, sometimes modulated. This corresponded with an agonised scream -clearly one of the men being struck dead by 'something huge and quick'. Not the sort of man to panic or go into shock, he'd snatched up one his sighted prisoners to try and force her to report what was happening outside.

She hadn't obeyed.

And that was when Tom and I entered.

"Are you going to help us?", asked the blind man.

I was too tired and burnt-out to properly think about such a nuanced reversal-of-fortune. No Pulp Fiction denouement today. I felt morally weak, all the more so when Tom made the decision for me.

"Not a chance".

The man warned us that he wouldn't beg, at which point Tom and I started to pace away.

In hindsight, with a clear head, I would have voted to abandon him, too.

XT

At the last extremity of plaster-and-aluminium before stepping into the world, we hunched close and conversed.

"What do we do about it?"

"About what?"

"The sky", I heard my own childish voice. "If it's still full of whatever it is that blinded them-"

"What is it that can blind someone, just by looking at it?", Tom asked, only partially dismissive.

I told him that I believed it. Any sort of intense light can blind someone if it catches them at the correct angle. And a few months ago, it had been an 'and finally' news story -scientists had managed to make that sci-fi holy grail, an invisibility cloak, by using high-powered nano-particles to catch and reflect light. If anything, it seemed like an even simpler matter to program them to emit a light bright enough to blind someone.

Tom disappeared back into the tower. He returned a few minutes later with a smartphone, maybe his own, maybe not. Keeping his head narrowly in the shade, he extended an arm into the broad daylight and ranged the camera around.

"I see a clear sky, in all directions. Nothing bright".

"What about the men who died out there?"

It took an unnerving amount of time for my friend to answer. "I don't think so, but the angle of the ground is very tight".

"What about the transfer yard? Do you see my lorry?"

Lazily breathing, otherwise very much like an all-business U-boat lookout, "No lorry. And it looks like all the cars have been scuttled".

"I don't want to stay _here_ ", I deliberately sounded petulant.

"We'll make a run for it, shall we? Probably keep our eyes on the ground, we'll be OK".

I'm sure everyone had a very dramatic story about our country's transition from civil war to apocalypse. Tom and I were no different. We ran, and ran, and ran. When we finally staggered-out our progress through semi-rural countryside, I was panicked by a sudden stinging sensation around my eyes, sure that the blinding sickness was starting its work on me. After a time, I realised it was just sweat from my unprecedented work-out. We shambled up a hillside behind a tiny village, onto a kind of mini-ridgeway delivering a thirty-mile-plus view of the West of England.

The disarray was ghoulishly, childishly engrossing. Strange clouds turned the daylight and the natural glow of the Earth into abstract, electric-matte flickers, often with air-to-air crackles of static lightning. Equally, the earthbound drama was pervasively insane. At least a dozen columns of rippling smoke punctuated such frightening sights: a crashed plane very close to a vacant motorway, capital towns made small by the rat-tat-tat of automatic gunfire, unfightable fires so utterly solid, as if the work of some mad oil-painter too reliant on Brilliant Orange.

Even then, I knew that the war was already finished, at least in terms of differing ideas of civilisation being ranged against each other. Any fighting now was probably just an expression of The End of the World -deep in the air was a sense of ancient, inhuman evil. Call it the Devil. Everything had a medieval disdain of greedy, latterday consciousness. People living decades too long. All the people sleepy, as if on cushions made of their own skin and body-fat.

I asked Tom where he planned to go.

"Home, I suppose. Further into Bristol".

I'd frowned massively. "Do you have a family?"

"My ex-wife and I hate each other. My daughter lives in New Zealand".

"I'm not sure it's a good idea to be heading into a city".

"Why on Earth not?", he was genuinely surprised. "There'll be soldiers there to protect us".

"There'll also be people. Fighting over food. Getting completely crazy with panic. You should come with me. I was born in the countryside. I can teach you how to fish, skin a rabbit, make a camp..."

This was all true. My dad had been a forager; I'd stumbled into being a lorry-driver just by some mild happenstance.

"What about Vichelle", asked Tom. "I'm guessing she's your -wife? Daughter?"

"How do you know about Vichelle?"

"You always used to call after her in your sleep".

We'd go to collect her, I told him, trying to sound confident, not at all cursed-echoey. The town of Masbar would hardly be a metropolitan war zone, twenty miles short of Unity City and with a population of retired bourgeois. If anything, it was a gateway to the safe, open wilderness of the South and the South-West.

Into the country lanes of ancient grey trees, offering both cover and unhappy glimpses of a violent sky. Even when there was relative brightness, an ominous air-pressure was designed to carry either eerie silence or the regular thrumming of distant explosions. Whenever a single car passed by, our senses became weirdly-attuned to detecting the bubbling point of human evil and human desperation; most of the time we ducked into fields or between trees. Pastoral crab-apple groves and acres of squashed-down hedgerows bent a knee to this or that distant village green, this or that common road, this or that quarry, all of them intensely hushed as they awaited the End of the World.

Melodramatic? It was also around this time that we felt the first of the earthquakes. Tectonic

broncoing seemed to shake the entire planet. We couldn't believe that any kind of military technology was able to produce something so deep and deadly. But at the same time, we couldn't have imagined that the war had been joined by a third-party-contender, far beyond us squabbling humans, something as primal as the air, the soil, chlorophyll.

On Tom's smartphone, the internet connection was permanently unavailable. The radio facility wouldn't work without headphones, and so we were left desperate for news. In the isolated church of Buzzard Hampton, we sumptuously absorbed the information given to us by a vicar and his bizarre, seemingly secular congregation. The television stations wouldn't even display a carrying signal, let alone any transmissions. But in the corner was an old-fashioned analogue radio, with an even older MW tuner, speaking of desperate military scrambles both in England and on the Continent. America was fussing with the UN about the legality of sending troops, since there'd been reports of both state and rebel forces using chemical weapons, in defiance of the International Diplomacy Pact. I briefly wondered if President Trump would defy them. Isolationist or no, the reconstruction of Britain would represent a business proposition, and the man was nothing if not an industrialist. After all, no one could deny how we'd looked on at America's unbelievable GDP success from our apocalyptic civil war and felt woozy with jealousy.

Russia, told the radio, was monitoring the situation, but hadn't ruled out sending humanitarian assistance as soon as 'contamination issues' had been resolved.

I knew it was the real deal, though. The end of civilisation. Our wars so far had been so painfully arbitrary, suggesting that the first genuine reason for conflict -the need for shared resources and a cessation of social classes- would surely take us unaware, wipe us out. The Nazi idea of everyone except the Aryans being worthy -childish. The way we'd fought the Communists in the Cold War, seeing them mainly as a military aggressor rather than a necessary moral challenge -childish. There'd never been a war based solely on the human race being inherently irrational, inherently greedy, and on such a universal, subconscious level. The subconscious conceit would destroy us all.

We walked far and wide across an odd, changed country.

In the pretty micro-valleys of Shipley where my Dad and I had once gone pheasant hunting, and chatted about Man United, and Miami Vice, and all the stupid guests on Wogan, Tom and I were set upon by a man with a shotgun. He was intensely jittery, and swung the barrel away from us seemingly on a whim.

"The Agent K is spreading everywhere. It was on the radio. Some of the government scientists made a miscalculation and it's spread everywhere, into every other town. Unity is dead. So is Bristol and Birmingham. The sky itself is turning against us with all the chemicals".

I asked him, "What about the town of Masbar?"

He said he didn't know. It was unreasonable to expect him to be swayed from his self-indulgent panic. om and I wouldn't have been able to process a detailed answer anyway; it was late at night and we were deathly tired from our journey. Into the fields the deranged shotgun man continued.

"We should rest up for the night, make our way into Masbar in the morning".

Tom, as ever, was right. We robbed an abandoned scaffold trailer of bungees and tarps, made a secure little tent on a densely wooded hillside.

Predictably, I dreamed of being tortured, and it was the strangest thing -I'd never before heard _any_ music in my dreams, let alone a nightmare three-way of 'Walking in a Winter Wonder Land', 'All I Want for Christmas is You' and 'Here it is, Merry Christmas'. I slept, tho hardly becoming refreshed.

DX

Tom was directly over me, in such a strange pose and in tears. "Wake up, Bobby. Something terrible's happened, but I need you to be alert and ready, _right now"._

Three seconds after waking, I nonetheless told him that I was. Whimpers crept into his voice, and I couldn't immediately understand the emotion that had overcome him, only that it had fused with a kind of last-chance-saloon determination. Eyes wide, I was orientated enough to scramble along beside him in the morning twilight.

It didn't take more than a moment or two to realise that he'd been blinded -very badly wounded, too, somewhere near his head. He gasped and yelped, though these noises were highly compartmentalised from his deep, commanding voice. Everything he had was focussed on keeping us alive.

"Do you remember those noises that the CRG men in the tower were talking about? Like metal tape measures being trailed on the floor. Do you hear them now?"

Come to think of it, I did. It was horrible. The mocking, tension-filled rattle of something incredibly strong and brittle making semisonic sweeps along the ground. Static-charged yelps would occasionally jump out to suggest it had found something of interest, or was changing course, or was...communicating?

"That noise", explained Tom. "We need to be moving away from it, quickly".

In doing so, we must have trailed about six or seven hundred metres across the other side of the valley. Tom was no longer rasping in pain, but he was weak to the point of being unable to stand, also sweating profusely.

That my friend had made it so far was amazing -I saw that his neck and collarbone had been badly hit out of place, and there was a hard swelling about the size of a grapefruit. On hurriedly undoing his buttons, I saw that there was the strangest pattern of welts, like the imprint-slap of a giant proboscis. Indeed.

On collapsing for the final time, he immediately started to use the remainder of his strength to speak. "I went to have a wee. And I saw -giraffes. That's what they looked like in the dark. Their legs were too small, though, and they didn't have any joints; they just swayed along on a funny centre of gravity".

He was dying. He was relaying just enough information for me to survive, about a scientific phenomenon no layman had ever encountered before. Thousands of people developing the latest pretentious Apple product, or the latest unnecessary Dyson appliance, as if giving the military scientists tacit permission to waste their lives developing these bizarre, exotic weapons. Backsterites. Triffids. 'The Plants'. Different people called them different things, but footnote: I will call them Triffids. They deserve a more striking name than 'The Plants'. 'Backsterite' is the correct military name, and so I will use the colloquial 'Triffid' in order to spite the goons.

It was Tom's whispered, dying statement that illustrated how these creatures had gone so thoroughly out of control, taking us all by surprise. He told how, far too late, he'd figured out that a sharp change in the rattling sound had corresponded with their having detected him. After all, they have no eyes, no clear sense of purpose -the uninitiated could easily believe they're dealing with a gentle and placid creature. For one thing, behold those jointless, impractical legs and the bizarre centre of gravity, making a nonsense of Natural Selection as surely as if the creature had a bullseye on its head, Darwin with a crossbow.

He'd watched with fascination as the lead Triffid had 'gone prone', folding its legs bizarrely and laying down its neck (stem?) until it had passed from eight to barely four feet tall. Clicking at such an accelerated rate, in hindsight, it seems far too obvious that this is the motion of a creature getting ready to pounce.

'Like a squid expelling ink', a lot of the blind would report, only with ink that seems to catch the light, redirecting it fearsomely. As soon as you see it, there's the impact of something strange beyond words, and perfectly mesmerising. All the colours displayed in those tiny particles do something wildly complex; I heard one man trying to simplify it as the same principle as dropping a bead of water on a laptop screen, only with sharply-refracted super-colours delivering a kind of 'mescaline-plus' effect, 2001 profundity on the tips of a thousand needles.

Even when the initial survivors started to warn the sighted, they'd still stop and gawp. They couldn't help themselves. It was Medusa and the Sirens both at once, and the population of modern Britain with its famous self-discipline.

Tom had staggered around for a few minutes. He told me he'd even laughed, though this may have been more in shock than humour. The bullwhip tendril, presumably from the self-same creature that had blinded him, knocked him wildly from his feet.

He crawled some distance to return to me, Mr Orange, with the added stress of subtly crawling free from those delicate little echo-location pings. Even as he died in my arms, I started to hear them myself, locked on and approaching once more.

Another thing the victims say; once you've heard that strange alien rattle once, you then hear it constantly, as a kind of stress-induced phantom.

And even here, I was the odd man out, still only getting wave after wave of Christmas knees-up. In hell.

CS.

So much of my life became a simple matter of stalking across the land with mindless determination. The same sense of purpose I'd once used to fill out tachometer reports at work, queue at cashpoints, dart across speeding ringroads to catch a bus. Certainly, I made it back to Masbar, to discover my landlady still alive, to discover the 'Dear John' letter which Vichelle had left on the kitchen table, propped beneath one of those 'submerged plane' aquarium toys.

Nothing mattered for a very long time except survival. Out-stalking the Triffids, the cannibals, the cold -it simply became part of life. Rarely there was a genuinely emotional event, and even when there was, the emotion was sorrow. For example, years after it had all kicked off -apparently with everyone in the last stages of starvation except me -

I'd been physically alone for who-knows-how-long, alone within myself for longer still. Wavering directly beneath a violent electrical storm, frightened because of the loudest-thing-conceivable volume -that funny trick-of-the-mind, the way it sounds like the sky is being specifically rearranged in favour of... nothing human. An earthquake followed which produced hella vertigo, nausea, plus a weird oversensitivity in my limbs once I'd fallen to the ground.

It was while I was reeling, I saw a woman. She'd collapsed just inside the concrete cusp of what had once been a small farming compound. She was starting to recover herself when she detected my approach. I saw that she was beautiful, through it all. And so began my wrong-footed philosophical musing -meeting another human soul, the modern equivalent of finding a twenty-pound note in the street. Meeting a beautiful woman -finding a wad of hundreds; your own luck scares you.

"Stay back!", she commanded me with a Stanley.

Couldn't be more of a healthy reaction, and I respected the circle of death.

"There's no need to be scared" -annunciating surprisingly well considering the months of solitude.

"What do you want?"

"Companionship", I told her, but then immediately worried this might sound like a euphemism for something ugly like sex or romance. Correcting myself, "Talk, just talk".

"You're a liar. Why have you been following me?"

I said something then, I can't remember what, which made myself laugh. She stared daggers. "I know a trap when I see one".

I asked why she was distrustful; she suggested that I was a scout. For raiders. Cannibals. She Sherlocked that I was well-fed, travelling light, which rumbled me: I could hardly reveal that I had a huge cache of food as little as five miles away. Or could I? In the meantime, practically begging for a conversation.

Italian-looking eyes fitted mysteriously with a malnourished jawline, steady as a pebble in a rockpool. Also, how delicate her atmos-bleached baseball cap and hiking tunic seemed. Fascinating, endlessly fascinating, the deliberate and co-ordinated buzzing of her atoms. Tensed, not particularly afraid.

She said plainly, "There's a chance you're a good person. And we need each other. But what's the best that can come of it? We watch each other die?"

"Even if we do die, won't it be better to have someone to talk to, to distract us?"

All the possibilities of what I could say to her, all pretty bountiful; it felt like drowning in thick water. And let's not forget that I was indeed well-fed. As such, I had a mind that should be clear, methodical, with an obligation to persuade her. An obligation I failed.

In my memory, and at that time in history, she was the most beautiful woman I'd ever seen, damaged pores or no. It was almost distracting me from our conversation. With an inexplicably strong and steady arm, she was pointing, "Less than half a mile in that direction, there's in a cottage with precisely half the roof missing that I spent a night in. One of the rooms has a record player that still works. What you want, that kind of intimacy? That's the best you'll get. Music that I once listened to. A shared experience. That's all I can give you".

"How can a record player still be working?", I asked, as much a way of protracting our talk than out of genuine interest. Anything that uses even the simplest printed circuits, anything that uses a copper or a fused electrical line... as dead as Winston Churchill.

"You'll see when you get there".

Yes, she was an extraordinarily strong woman. Or perhaps she was just reserving herself now that emoting is such a weird decadence. Italian-looking eyes, permanently wincing without being too badly damaged by the wind, all the more beautiful because of it.

Thinking, if any of the gangs had seen her, she _would_ have been raped. At any time, she could have opened her eyes from the centre of a perfect ring of Triffids and been blinded, as if by the universe itself. Yet her eyes were so sparky, it seemed like a very _different_ form of mental torture that had broken her. After all this time, she was miraculously, unambiguously _alive_. Yet miraculously, unambiguously... oblivion-bound.

"Take this...", I produced a tiny bottle of wife-beater from my ruc-sac. Possibly the last bottle in England, and needless to say they no longer sponsored Wimbledon. She stared disapprovingly.

"I don't want it. It only dehydrates you".

"But the pay-off? If you haven't drunk in over a year or two, just a mouthful gives you a buzz. A whole bottle, in all this cold, feels like heroin. You offered me some of your intimacy. Let me offer you some of mine".

"You don't understand", she squared up to me slightly, even from afar. "Every reassuring thought we've ever had, or ever will have, was only ever a trap. To bring out our sorrow. If you want to give me the bottle? Put it down by your feet and walk away. I'll pick it up when you're in the distance. But I don't take charity-"

In turn, she placed a half jar of coffee at her own feet and backstepped away.

I collected the ancient Sainsbury's own, then walked confidently in the direction she'd gestured. All the way, striding towards that house -the _idea_ of a house- I knew in my bones that things had gone exactly as they should have. In my bones I knew this, in my guiltily-nourished stomach, in the mechanical parts of my Sekonda as dead as Grandma Walton.

Just a shade of confusion entered me when, a few hundred metres into following her carefully-pointed finger, my path was abruptly closed off by a canal. Down a sharp field, through an emaciated hedge, I found myself suddenly motionless and staring hard at heavily creeping water. On either side of towpath, Triffids went about their business, seemingly out for a Sunday stroll, but soon to detect me with their murderous sonar.

Then I saw what to do: adventure, desperation. The power lines from some fifty-foot masts had been snagged directly down to the ground. They sloped through the hedge, across the towpath, to hang heavily in the canal. I would use them as a hand-rail across the open water. Taking off my jacket and trousers, I bundled them into my haversack and threw it clear, the impact coming just a few inches inside the ruddy no-man's-land on the opposite bank. And then over to the grey, rubber cables -I touched them easily, not expecting an electric shock, thereafter descending straight into the water.

The cold was extreme, almost annihilating my ability to think and move. Screaming and shouting helped; I glimpsed the Triffids swinging with supernatural sharpness towards the spot where I'd waded in. God knew what I'd do if more of them suddenly converged at my exit point on the other side.

After that, I found the place with an eerie amount of ease -it stood isolated, and as she'd said, with precisely half the roof was missing. Like all houses of the day, the insides had become strangely uniform, and if you were playing a computer game, you'd accuse the programmers of being lazy. Or maybe, if the game was something of the nineties generation, you'd understand because they'd sacrificed detail in favour of using the processing power to conjure a bigger world. Bigger, but greyer. Rooms discoloured with furnishings removed for camp-fires and only a few distinguishing features remaining.

That British, pre-apocalyptic desire to possess our own, parochial little houses; nowadays, how it can so easily be the death of you if you aren't careful. Enter the wrong burnt-out shell with the intention of making it your castle, you could equally end up in a cooking pot. Even as I hung in the ammonia-smelling doorway, however, I knew the Italian-looking woman wouldn't have directed me into a trap. I had seen the innocence in her eyes, innocence guaranteed by suffering. In myself, simply guilt.

Each room was grey and barren. But one of them did indeed have a record player -or, not exactly a record player; the need for electricity and wiring had been circumvented by taking the graphite deck and stylus arm and placing them on the spinning section of a potters wheel, operated by foot. Speakers, obviously, would never have worked, so the tramp-inventor had placed a halved cooking drum around the circumference; this did something magical in trapping the sounds of the stylus, the static.

I greedily started the pedal. What the record _was_ I couldn't tell, since the wording at the centre circle was worn down and covered in barnacles. Still the joyous hiss of old-fashioned needle-on-vinyl filled the air. On tensing my ears for such a long time-

There they were. The phantoms of my torture; disparate chord structures of 'Fairytale of New York', 'Away in a Manger', 'The Power of Love'. Down I went like a sack of potatoes, hyperventilating as surely as if the air was pure carbon monoxide. Later on, someone tried telling me this was a classic PTSD panic attack, though I'm sure there was more to it than that. Staring at that spinning record player, I was back in time. I was still being tortured, and it went far beyond my having been captured by fanatics. The pain and the suffering had always been there, part of the universe itself.

XC.

The end of the world, for me, was a thing of irony. Perhaps it was for you, too. All the things that made everyone else wail, and crawl, and despair, for me was just a continuation. Everyone's sensibilities were simply inverted alongside mine like two rulers swiveled end-to-end. From infanthood, and pretty inexplicably, I'd been aware that people's vying over houses and resources, all that social nepotism and blameless greed, was a bad thing to get involved in. As soon as I was old enough to seriously think about these things, I fantasised about living in the woods and not asking anyone for anything. In the prairie a couple of miles from where my family lived there was some abandoned reservoir towers; I had my eye on one of those. And let's not forget the old man who lived in the patchwork bungalow alongside the A46, in the middle of nowhere. So impractical, it was either a flat-out miracle or the work of some transcendental Swami who'd trained his molecules to subsist on nothing. Also, I was pretty obsessed with dynamos and solar power, little knowing that one day even the conductivity of electrical circuits would be denied to us.

Later on, in my twenties and thirties, it was easy to imagine that if you could dilute maybe a hundredth, thousandth, a _millionth_ of my personality into greater society, there'd never again be any recessions, and the welfare state could be joyfully dissolved. They could still have their houses, and their kids, but just the _nuance_ -of meeting me a hundredth, thousandth, a _millionth_ of the way -would have steered them true. Not to be. They continued to build luxury houses on tiny cramped spaces in the middle of towns, while all around vast areas of grassland eluded our perception like the space between quantums. They continued to import mountains of cheap perishables from ching-chong while Western Man grew fat and vulnerable.

Funny; I'm writing this in an inclusive tone, and in sentences that are long and totally at odds with my damaged fingers; there's a reason for that.

When it all started, there's dim memories of my landlady saying, 'I expect you've got family you need to get to', as a kindly prompt that I should leave for fear of being a drain on her food cupboard. I neither liked or disliked Mrs Weston; Vichelle always got on better with her than I did. I could have dominated her if I'd wanted, killed her at worst. But I liked her cat. "Do I get my deposit back?"

Reveling in my sudden life of luxury, since whatever happened wouldn't be as soul-destroying as going to work everyday as a put-upon lorry driver, I took some time to relax in my rooms. Shaved off my hair and stared at the two industrial scars I'd never before seen in isolation. Stared at my bookshelf, too. It was blatant that very soon books would simply be units of kindling, especially the type of non-s-y books that I liked. A photo album, obviously, I'd take. The Bible. The Koran. Not so much because they'd provide a moral compass but because they were so dense with copy and made for good value. Ditto the Molloy trilogy by Samuel Beckett. I'd prepared my ruc-sac. Like everyone else, I'd only had a few days to get ready, but I'd already got lucky during the panic-buying. Or rather, the panic-looting. I believe in luck, and that's an asset. It's nothing to be ashamed of; I always used to win more than I lost at Coral, and I never placed a bet without internally time-travelling forwards to Match of the Day at 10.20.

But my new life; it was no longer a case of, 'If you don't like driving around car parks, don't go shopping on Christmas Eve'. Prolonged survival meant lateral thinking and making dozens of contingency plans. I had faith in my main plan, but there was a solid alternative if it all went wrong, IE stockpiling from increasingly curveball sources. From childhood countryside walks with my dad, I remembered farmhouses so isolated they were practically invisible to the outside world. And since the fall of the farming industry, ninety percent were just well-stocked second homes for yuppies, eminently killable.

Like a lot of men of a certain generation, with a girlfriend-but-no-kids disposable income, I owned a keg-cutting Samurai sword. When I was twenty-five, I loved it because it was just so utterly cool, and I could pretend my life was decisive like Shogun Assassin or Zatoichi. Later on, I loved it simply because it was the most substantial thing I owned. A lot of the lads at work owned airguns that fired legally-dubious 7mm rounds, and how I regretted not getting one myself. We'd have been comparable with Will Ferrell in Stepbrothers, except that we all had jobs in industry, more proactive than most people could dream of. The Samurai sword has always been useful, tho; I estimate at least a football-field-worth of Triffids have collapsed, lamenting it's brush-steel blade to their stupid chlorophyll gods. Also, best of all, the sword has warned people to stay away from me. Walking the streets, moving out, I was so confident I wore it on my shoulder, alongside the gear, unfortunately not too easy to unsheath.

As the pubs were finishing up the last of their liquor, everyone had moved out onto the high street around bonfires. One fire in particular consisted of a cashpoint that had been ripped wholesale from the alcove, cash and receipt carousels burning like Ghost Rider's wheels. A tearful middle-age man was laughing at how a dartboard was refusing to burn. If only those people had anything I wanted, they'd have been so easy to pick off.

The fire was powerful, giving a brilliant glow to all those involved, dreamlike figures. It still seemed like a small thing, tho, horribly contrasted against the winter-blue tone of the buildings. Towards the base of the high street, some fatsos had rolled cars into a makeshift blockade to stop anyone new from entering the town. This gave me mixed emotions: these neo-chieftains were not actually _from_ this part of town, rather decisive-voiced terrace dwellers from the big estate -a yuppie housewife was remonstrating that if the army sent an aid convoy, they'd need immediate access. Except it was obvious the army was no more. As the chattering woman yelped, her husband stood by awkwardly. Instinctively, I felt my allegiance go to the semblance-of-working-class men -not by a long way, but enough that if they'd killed the yuppie housewife, it would have been fine by me.

Further spookiness made me take evasive action down the high stone alleyway. Memories: having just seen Star Wars as a kid, I'd imagined I was part of Red Squadron in the Death Star trench, while my Dad walked behind with Turvy the Dog. Leaving my home town for the last time, I had no feelings of nostalgia or sadness. Above the park, some quail-faced homeowners were edged in at the cusp of their garden, staring grimly at the glow of street fires. Retirees, whether they'd assumed their life of leisure age thirty or sixty-five -irrelevant, given the country had never really needed their architectural job, their teaching job, their consultancy job in the first place. I'd have been justified in robbing them. Said the man to his make-up-wearing wife, 'Civilisation was only ever skin deep'.

No, no. We had a quite a solid civilisation, if only because of the NHS, before the upperclasses had given mandate to Jeremy Hunt and EU immigrant slavery. And let me stress, I think it's likely you feel the same way I do: if there was even a _chance_ that the human race could come back from this, I'd have tried to become a great leader of men. Self-sacrificing, inspiring, giving them the benefit of the doubt, trusting they'd learn to live selfless, pragmatic lives for the first time ever. But I was sure, to quote Private Frazer, 'We're doomed'.

That optical illusion exhausted drivers used to get, when you approached a motorway from an angle, and it looked like all the cars were stopped, but when you actually got there, it was all flowing normally. Except all of a sudden, the illusion was real. I crossed the dead overpass, luxuriating in the sight of such motionless pandemonium. Let's be honest, it was always a symbol of our self-imposed oppression, wasn't it, the motorway? As a kid, I was darkly mesmerised that there couldn't possibly be so many people in the country to produce such a constant flow of vehicles, the whole thing surely a demiurge illusion. And, of course, the idea of having to commute to work; everything that was wrong with our country. Towns and villages, representing perfect units of economic potential, spurned in favour of the vagaries of the city. Every other week, a Passenger Focus muppet would produce a report on the national news complaining about trains, while councils were allowed to run their bus routes like twenty mile splodges of densely tangled yarn, and why am I late for work? Because a proto-yuppie student in a rich little village five miles from anywhere had to get to an hour-long college lesson.

I felt empowered and vindicated. What a joke. Abandoned cars were husked-out on the motorway like fishing boats brought low on a dried-up lake, me completely fearless like a National Geographic snooper. One or two Triffids lurched between them like kids in a boring maze. Directly under the bridge was a dead man in the process of decomposing, with a single Triffid preparing to absorb his mulch as fertilizer. Interestingly, the other creatures were too lazy even to fight him for it, and, yup, that's capitalism.

I walked along the little farm track alongside the army barracks at Harrydean, then did a double-take. I'd always wanted to bait the 'TRESPASSERS WILL BE MET WITH AN ARMED RESPONSE' sign. For one thing, while driving past the place day after day, I'd never once seen _anyone_ inside the blocky little village, armed sentry or otherwise. Moreover, the idea of squaddies actually _needing_ guns around parochial little Moonrakers like us made no sense -still less giving firearms to the foreign cadets and UN-exchange soldiers who used the same bus as me. With their three words of English, give them Ken Dodd tickle-sticks and they'd be as much f- use.

Yet the size of the place. It spoke of that military decadence we all know so well; there would surely be stores to rob. All the big men, if they were there, would be sitting back with their families in a false sense of security. If I could appropriate what I needed, it might even circumvent my original plan, to unlock my own company's warehouse and pilfer from there. The pliers were burning a hole in my pocket.

So I pressed the 'R3' stick to go into sneak-mode; in my pocket, the hunting knife folded free from its restraining bolt. I'd always thought the place had bad security -to have no more than a mesh fence and a three-deep line of trees, so easy to creep through. A cat who'd no doubt been hit by a car and crawled into the undergrowth to die, a long time ago, leaned happily at an angle as if to say, 'it's good to be asleep'.

The outlying buildings were all empty with pristine plastered walls. I peered through them for a long time. Within the more used-looking terraces were furnishings, TVs, a Crystal Palace flag (I never had a problem with Crystal Palace). On a curb, I saw a Ninja Turtle action figure just sitting there in the sickly-looking grass. Leonardo. At the time, I don't know why I picked him up to ride in my waist pocket, but in he went.

Towards the sub-buildings of the old aircraft hangar. I had visions of pallet-loads of those disaster-relief food-pouches, which I tried once and very much liked. And still the place was dead, not exactly silent but with a distant ambient noise I couldn't remotely identify. Cool reassurance, moral justification, a spring in my step were all reinforced by the huge gulfs between the houses. It seemed yet another bullet point of Military arrogance that they'd allowed so much extra space just for twenty or so staff houses, which should have been utilitarian-tight. A lot of them were at an unobservable angle to each other, which helped very much in my sneaking.

Stealth prompted me to dart at speed across some wide roads all folding inwards to the main hangar. Within the very close confines of the sub-warehouses, I felt reasonably safe.

Then, from out of nowhere came three people; a cliche-buzzcut, a well-fed man and a small boy. The small boy was holding the well-fed man's hand, and he yanked it tight when Cliche-buzzcut said to him, "Eyes front, Rex". He said it under his breath in what I read as, 'We need to be cool if we're going to kill him cleverly'.

And yeah. They were on top of me straight away, and the bigger man immediately moved to take his kid to safety. I couldn't let this happen; the presence of the boy was the only advantage I had.

Military Haircut said to me, "What are you doing here, Sir?"

I called after the bigger man, already several paces away with the kid, "Rex? It's me".

He turned and stopped a little, but it was the kid who spoke, "Is he another soldier?"

I smiled and bent down on my knees, addressing the brat directly. "I'm friends with your dad. But first and foremost, I found this guy", I produced the Ninja Turtle, "I think he belongs to you".

The lad took it before anyone could stop him.

Meanwhile, inside me, adrenaline, "What do you say, Rex? Us boys with our toys, yeah?"

"Come on, Sean", said the fat man to his son.

Except the boy was mesmerised; he'd noticed my sword. "Is your sword just the same as Leonardo's?"

He unsheathed the tiny plastic sword from the Ninja Turtle's back.

"That's a Katana. Mine's a Samurai Sword. But I should be careful about real swords. They're dangerous. Someone might get hurt".

Either way, that was it. The kid was hauled away, and into his place - _right_ into his place, so in-my-face it was almost psychic- the buzzcut advanced. I backtracked while he moved forward in broad strides, smiling. Never breaking eye-contact, I stayed insouciant, hoping my expression would say, 'Really? The military all looking after themselves after the End of the World? That's a bit of cliche'. Night of the Comet! Down with President Snow! But really, I could have said anything, represented any philosophical truism, and it wouldn't have changed a thing. That was the meaning of the sheer relish he had for intimidating me. As he advanced, he gave high pitched whistles without having to put his fingers in his mouth.

The following is melodramatic. But it's also the truest thing in the world.

I always knew that the afterlife was waiting for me; I could sense it. The certainty was there in my head as a piece of implicate knowledge, emphasised by the fact that I didn't even want it. I could quote very convincing theories of human consciousness and eternal life from the dozens of quantum-baiting books I read as a hobby, but they hardly mattered at all in the long run. Here's the thing; as a kid, I had my own little vision of Heaven. As I grew up, and life got more intolerable, I indulged that vision. This is only natural. It's what everyone does if they're sufficiently un-conceited. But later -this life makes you sick. Everyday, the sensation of whooshing through the air, your personality and your ability to think straight being lost in the atmos like dandelion seeds. Your mind is a piece of metal being beaten out of shape by a Nazi capitalist demon. She has a hammer -that three-kids, glowing-eyed housewife you all used to worship. She's destroying you with a lump-hammer and you can't even legitimately hate her because it's just the motion of an entropic universe's death rattle.

The anvil you're laid across is hope, and the afterlife. It's Stockholm Syndrome. It makes no sense to love something once you've been beaten out of shape conceptually. In Britain, it was always the sanest and most practical choice to simply go into a wood and hang yourself. But I chose not to commit suicide simply because it would upset my family. I thought I could stay sane and employed for as long as they lived, through sheer grit alone. So I capitulated, I collaborated, I sold out. And every day she preyed upon me, that capitalist demon, with her millions of children who were allowed to opt out of utilitarian existence from birth. It was Pixar studios. 'Inside Out' - Nazi soldiers ransacked my mind, stealing away units of my personality to be expatriated to concentration camps. At first it's all the crazy characters you miss the most, the Mighty Boosh wiped from existence. Then it's 'Innocence' you mourn. Then 'Consciousness' itself goes, and somehow Damien Hurst was wrong. Death is _perfectly_ possible in the mind of something living, and it looks nothing like a shark in formaldehyde.

I thought about pulling my knife on the soldier -after all, that was the point of having it ready in my pocket- but intuition told me he'd be able to counter any move I made. Pincering around from the perimeter of the base, further squaddies moved in. Several shots were fired, the gunmen shouting things like, 'Ten mil main round, score!', 'Half clip sixteen mil, mark!' It took me a while to figure out what they were doing; someone somewhere was keeping a handwritten tally of the ammunition they used.

Not that they needed _any,_ really. They had me cornered, so much so that a few of them could afford to drift into the background again, leaving the four guys who gave me the beating of my life. One of them was instantly marked out as someone of my generation, because he called me a 'Spastic' in that very politically-incorrect, eighties schoolyardy kind of way. They tipped my ruc-sac on the ground and took what they wanted. When they were finished, they tossed it several yards clear. I glimpsed one of them trying to bend my sword over his knee, but he couldn't, and so that was tossed as well. I keenly wondered if I was about to bodily thrown myself, like Jazzy Jeff versus Uncle Phil. As it was, I was left to ambulate clear. Grabbing my sword in numb hands, I moved back the way I'd come. Sleep on kitty.

Across the fields in a vague direction. I worried that I'd received a deeply shattered rib because the slightest touch brought astonishing agony, alongside hints of some unhealable injury to my spine. They fixed up as good as new in the end, tho. In the meantime there was a kind of numbness and a weird jumpy effect to my vision, cue the most depressing 007 opening sequence in history; twigs in the shape of Vichelle's face, trees collapsing into the earth like craftwork lightning bolts, preserved by the pahoehoe of God's silence. If only there'd been silence in my mind, too. Like the most natural thing in the world, I heard the phantoms of 'Mistletoe and Wine', 'December Song', by George Michael, 'Can you stop the cavalry?'

There seemed to be little choice about whether I should rest in the bungalow at the crest of the hill, once I had reasonable grounds to think it was empty. The glazed patio doors were already smashed; quite a feat.

A couple of days and nights followed, where I got seriously haunted by the non-silence of the landscape beyond and the tension of listening for enemies. I heard vague stirrings that might have been footfalls, but could equally have been the faultlines decompressing, plus all the dead branches coming low, the wind, etc. Now and then came the godless excitement of a distant shotgun blast, or a storage-war-gone-wrong.

Triffids passed very close beside the walls, myself strangely ambivalent.

Sure enough, since all the food in the main part of the bungalow had gone; intuition made me search the cramped little loft, where I found a catering pack of Christmas pudding of all things. In the following days, I got an impression of why my dad had always liked it so much, though at the time it'd been far too rich for me. Alternately, I boiled some of the water that'd been left over in ma and pa's immersion heater, sometimes mixing it with brown sauce to make the world's most disgusting beef broth.

And I know. This was still the early days, when food-stuff was relatively abundant. I can't imagine the weird, colourful things people must have eaten before turning to cannibalism. You see, from that point on, my fortune altered, at least in terms of finding food. Lucky? No. Rather, I was weirdly indulged by reality itself to at least remain alive. On a risen b-road stretching between villages, I saw a young man's corpse on the verge. His clothes from the waist up had been stolen, but something about the rough texture of his trousers and his boots suggested he'd been a motorcyclist. His pose was in parts rag-dolled and in parts doubled-up, suggesting there'd been some kind of momentum at the instant of death. Sure enough, wondering forwards, staring closely into the hundred-and-twenty degree verge, I saw his motorbike, deeply obscured by dead trees. The saddle bag contained dozens of tins. Peas, beans, jerky, bully beef.

It was only on the way back that I noticed four Triffids intermixed with the near-and-far tree trunks. Perhaps they were lost, or trapped. Either way, it was necessary for me to creep by so closely that my goosebumps prickled in exhilaration. But there'd be no death-wish kicking-of-the-hornet's-nest from me, not yet.

Survivor's Guilt activate, though. It was like... in the eighties, at the height of the craze for home computing, I regularly told my mum and dad that I didn't want one. Then one Christmas they got me a Commodore 64. I realised, of course, I'd wanted one all along. The knowledge, in my soul, that I could easily have lived without it was meaningless, because we're all of us trapped in history. Capitalist shame and the zen satisfaction for a wire-frame Star Wars game while listening to Depeche Mode on a more eighties-than-the-eighties Sony Walkman. Whether or not free will exists -irrelevant, so long as you can sense yourself as a ghost in the machine, bouncing around.

The onwards march of the European Union had led to the Catlin Statute. Britain's vote to remain in 2016 had led to a huge, faux-mandate to integrate our collective 'industries' even more. My own company only had a few months to get used to it, though, before the End of the World. Freight lorries moving inwards from European ports now had a legal right to store up to three pallets of their own goods in any UK warehouse bigger than two thousand cubic metres. During that funny last week of work, I'd been chatting to our Goods In supervisor, and was pretty astonished at the gall of Johnny Foreigner expecting to store three completely disparate pallets in our warehouse while he drove off to Felixstowe.

But ...three pallets worth of canned supermarket stock.

We'd been running a skeleton crew, and it had fallen to me to not only operate the dock, book the stuff in, but also fork it all up on the highest tier of our back wall. I pictured the way I'd filled out the spreadsheet. Pallets x 3. Simply to annoy them, I hadn't even bothered to fill out a content description. In theory, I was still the only person who knew it was there -for the moment. Inevitably, however, starving lads would monkey up the racking to make a methodical search, even tho it made no sense to expect a PSB distribution warehouse to sell anything other than electrical equipment.

The offices had been ransacked, but no one was there just at the moment. Passing through, I regarded my face in the 25th Anniversary group-photo, and felt ashamed at how apocalyptic I looked even then. The metal roller doors protecting Warehouse One had done a solid job of staying in place, but it had been impossible for them to withstand a crowbar denting the metal into the exact dimensions of a wriggling, crawling human. Intuition told me that if I tried to wriggle through myself, I might get a meat-cleaver in my head on the other side, so I unlocked it with my key and quietly-quietly raised it by three feet.

The place was dark. Over the years, whenever there'd been a power-cut, it was famous for being dark even in the height of summer, the skylights having been scratched dim by generations of bird talons. I crept forward, sword drawn, images of Brawler Butch versus Vincent Vega.

And sure enough, exactly in the middle of the aisles, some idiots were sleeping-bagged around an unwise indoor campfire, completely unconscious. I tiptoed into their midst; the first thing I noticed was a ukulele. Not a guitar, or a saxophone, or a cello -like you or I would use to draw solace from the End of the World. A hipster ukulele. This was soon explained by their swingy hair and scarves; both teenagers. Modern day, 'freed-from-the-tyranny-of-our-generation's-class-system' teenagers -pretend-posh and thoroughly doomed. No Muselmann in _this_ dying civilisation.

Using no particular volume in my voice, fully expecting to have to say it a dozen times, I told them to pick up their stuff and get out.

On waking, however, digesting my words, the boy wasn't the least bit nervous. In fact, "Do you have any food?"

A man approaches you, threatening you with a sword. You ask if he has any food! Says it all about how they saw the world, doesn't it? And, of course, all it took to entice a British teenager onto an industrial site was _the End of the World_.

It was at that moment that I made a solemn vow to myself. I would live long enough to see every last bourgeois in Britain die of starvation. I would live long enough to see cannibals become the dominant class system of the world. Because what is cannibalism except the ultimate form of capitalism? If people were always so enthralled to capitalism, it was only right that they should die by it. Besides; once their victims eventually dried up and died as well, it seemed logical that God would reveal himself to the last man and apologise profusely.

I would be that last man.

Once I was satisfied there was no one else in the compound, I climbed up the racking and stared in wonder at my three pallets of food. What I did then, I took a spade, opened up the secluded warehouse firedoor and walked the hundred metres down the rail line, then into the valley-top woodland. I started to dig. Regardless of bleeding hands, regardless of hours-on-end of backbreaking work (exacerbated by my beating by the squaddies), I succeeded in making a trench big enough to hide the three pallets-worth.

The rail-line had several dead cows next to it, and at first they freaked me out royally. Then, once I'd concealed my food under metal sheets covered with soil, I figured I could use them. Using the same flatbed I'd used to transport my treasure, I labouriously hauled one of the dead cows to the hiding place in the wood. It would serve two purposes. One, no one would want to go near anything so disgusting. Two, if a dog started sniffing around my food, the owner would just think it was investigating the bones. Clever? I thought so. As the night ended and what-passes-for-daylight filled the landscape, I retired to the underside of a bed in a nearby cottage, thinking, 'That's how easy it is to _live'._ How much food does a man need in his lifetime, anyway? Certainly no more than three pallets-worth. That night, I gobbled Chilli, tinned peaches for afters.

How I filled my days, then, as if it matters. My search for half-decent, extant books became obsessive, and no question that my sensibilities must have been pretty warped, given that I witnessed numerous atrocities while still worrying about finding non-hack paperbacks to read. Hiding out, I regularly saw people being hunted down, and not just when I peered into towns with my scope. Along the traintrack ran a sandy-haired weakling with a bulging ruc-sac, pursued by raiders on pushbikes. They not only took his stuff, they stabbed him to death, for no reason. Obviously, he should have thrown down his kit and hoped that'd be enough to placate them while he'd legged it to the hills. But after that, I had the brainwave of always carrying with me four jars of baby food which I'd surreptitiously mixed half-and-half with rat poison, figuring that if any raiders did ever rob me, they'd regret it. Why baby food? I supposed it was safe because there were surely no babies left in the entire world, and I had too much self-respect to eat it myself. Beyond that, maybe an ironic statement of revenge for the vacuous, children-before-adults society which had heavily contributed to Britain's fall. That vision of having everyone in the country standing before you and asking, 'Hands up anyone who thinks overpopulation _won't_ be a problem in the future, or that we'll ever be short of people? OK. We'll just pay you your benefits, your NHS bills and your maternity leave anyway'.

I kept no journal, beyond a five-bar-tally ranked lazily into months, there on the back page of the Unnamebale Trilogy. Years passed, apparently. Around the later months of the year, there'd sometimes be an asterix beside the bars, to indicate how surprised I'd been to have survived such a cold night. And I say, 'night'. If you're wise, it's best to sleep during the day and carry out your waking activities under a blanket of dark.

Sometimes, a collector's item would be if the marks of the five-bar-tally were replaced by question marks, to indicate that I'd briefly lost track of what day it was or how long I'd slept. This happened when I was ill. It happened as regular as clockwork.

Moving on the road, brain squirming like a toad, my joints would ache and I'd start to feel sleepy all the time, but most tellingly, my ears would swell up. It sounds like a joke. My ears would swell up; I'd put myself to bed somewhere magically warm, then wake up a few days later as good as new. It was more of an inconvenience than anything -but just how much of an inconvenience, you'll hear later.

During year three, the incident with the girl and the record player took place, and it troubled me. It meant something deeper than a simple regret that we'd not fallen in together, and deeper even than the regret for my rejection of humanity. My mind made dry, philosophical equations about God and suffering.

Months afterwards, destiny (call it that) sent me another long-term survivor. This time it was a painfully thin old man with a face that was only partially sympathetic. I decided I could handle whatever he threw at me, and so I jogged to catch up with him.

Along the field edges, Triffids swiveled to face us but weren't nearly fast enough to co-ordinate an attack.

First things first, he asked if I'd seen any others recently. I told him about the girl, and he said he understood her decision to remain alone. I also warned him about the cannibal camp to North, dying out tho it was. But cannibals? That's nothing, he told me. For the first time I was introduced to the concept of what he called, 'Propaganda Triffids', and to my immediate fascination. Apparently, if you could see a map of latterday Britain shaded by population of Triffids, the coastline would be completely black. Dense crowds filled out every square kilometer in a way that was maddening, and not just the regular Triffids. A fifty foot version of the standard model sidled along the sheer edges of water, apparently a kind of warning to any sea-going entity about exactly who the land belonged to now.

Digesting this, I was quick to double-check, "A fifty-foot Triffid?"

"See it and believe it. The legs are like coaches, the trunks are like...I don't know... a tornado made solid".

Then, give-and-take, and as a way of heading off the question before he could ask me first, I enquired how he'd managed to survive so long.

He told me that for months on end, he'd climbed inside the transfer tower of a farm refinery and eaten partially processed grain. No one else seemed to have thought of it, although often he had to stay away for long periods of time while gangs passed through. Beyond that there was lichen and barnacles; he said he'd been willing to gamble that they wouldn't make him ill, and so far that gamble had paid off.

At no point did he seem interested in how I'd survived, which unnerved me.

Instead, he asked me, pretty excitedly, what I'd been dreaming about. A curveball question I was completely unprepared for.

"I don't have full dreams. Just fragments. The same thing even before the End of the World. Running to catch a bus. Having to get somewhere. Being far from home".

This, of course, was a lie. I still dreamt exclusively about my torture.

"We're allowed to dream about whatever we want now".

He said that in such a subtle voice that I immediately penciled in the idea that he'd gone mad. And so it proved. He explained that he'd once worked for a religious group that had been preparing for the End of the World. Or rather ...he hadn't been working for them on a _conscious_ level; they'd taken control of his subconscious mind and he'd just -acquiesced. His daytime job, before the Fall of Man, had been the maintenance of Sky TV satellites and relays. The religious order had used him to monitor the progress of the so-called 'Black Knight', a satellite from the future that secretly orbited the Earth to probe the subconscious of mankind. These subconscious messages would eventually, he said, 'create God'.

We all secretly like listening to crazy people, don't we? I was rapt, hearing his explanation for the End of the World. Although equally I warned him that if he tried telling me that the greater part of modern humanity _hadn't_ deserved to die, I'd probably kill him. Capitalism allowed evil to win over good, blank-mindedness to win over consciousness, and it had been gleefully adopted in the mind of every man, woman and child.

He told me, "Our true consciousness was working on something else the whole time. Something bigger even than our dreams. Did you ever sleep with a woman?"

I wondered what kind of question that was, and tried not to stare like a child into his jagged old face. "Yeah".

"You'd fall asleep in each other's arms, probably because you were in love. But whatever happened... the hypnogogic sea would curve your limbs apart, like ancient trees. And it was so obvious. That's what Black Knight was reading from the edge of space; just the shapes made by our sleeping bodies. It was a secret language, a code passing between Man and God".

No sooner was I trying to understand the whole, crazy concept, than he was showing me an ancient notebook with painfully sketched diagrams, sleeping figures with legs drawn up, legs drawn out, elbows folded, elbows straight. Admittedly, they did look very much like the characters of some exotic language. Nonetheless, I told him that he was crazy. The shape you made when you slept didn't represent anything in your subconscious; you just assumed the most relaxing position based on how cold or hot it was, maybe whether you liked to have your ears covered.

The man said, "Who made it hot or cold? Who made our bodies? The fledgling God. We were just the letters He wrote with".

"Wrote what?", I demanded.

"That's His business. But our dreams always had to be curtailed in case they interfered with our sleeping shapes. The good thing now is that we're free. The code has finished running and we're allowed to dream about what we like, for the first time in our lives. We can go anywhere. Be with anyone".

Said myself, gesturing at the wasteland, "What's the point of dreaming when you're only going to wake up to this?"

"Nothing matters except ideas. Once you've got the idea of being free, you will be".

All along, I'd been planning to gift him a couple of cans of food, but suddenly I was overcome with hatred for his messianic-hippy claptrap, to the point where I let him limp on ahead until he was gone. It's the reason I gravitated towards the cannibals so much; I'd always thought that the End of the World, the loss of all our resources, would at least strip away our delusions, stereotyped or otherwise. Sometimes I'd watch the cannibal camp through my scope, see them talking -and feel jealous. Whatever they were, they weren't weak or conceited. No useless Tory MP toeing-the-line, but then, no nebulous ideas of endless capital, either.

All the same, that night, I wondered... what would I dream about if I had the opportunity to choose? Would I ever again dream of _anything_ other than being tortured? It would be bad form to think about anything that suggested a future. Girls would be completely out of the question. I decided I wanted to dream about... sunrays. A trip to the zoo on a sunny day. Just the _sight_ of seals, penguins, armadillos. Lions, reference The Old Man and the Sea. Anything except giraffes.

For the remainder of the day, I trained myself to imagine zoo animals. Sandy, worn-felt lions pawing around, gruff and satisfied like true Kings of the Jungle. Penguins belly-flopping like truamatised kids chilling out. When I slept, and apparently dreamed of nothing, I simply redoubled my efforts the next day. I pictured them in my mind with intense scrutiny, to the point where you could have snuck up and clubbed me though the middle of the wildest twig-snapping disco. The patterns in the lion's brow, as vivid and thoughtful as anything. I was determined to dream of handsome, harmless zoo animals or go wall-eyed trying.

That second night, I slept soundly, but again there was the cursed sensation of being completely dreamless. Sometime in the lost hours -maybe before midnight, maybe long after- a gentle little earthquake woke me. I back went to sleep staring intensely at my canopy of bungees and tarps stretched tight between close-knit trees. No dreams. No point in living. 'To Hell with it', I remember thinking, very earnestly hoping that I'd freeze to death long before morning. Triffids could be heard nearby, feeling their way so mechanically along the wonky rail line to Hell.

It was only then that I had an honest-to-goodness dream.

About Star Trek.

To feel disappointed that the subject matter was so geeky would have been snobbish, since it was actually one of the most detailed and exciting dreams I'd ever had. Star Trek, an actual episode, with myself playing a picture-perfect Captain Kirk -plus the camera angles, the hues of the bulkheads, the corridor running lights; all suggested some utterly iconic 'missing' episode from the sixties. I joined with Bones and Spock as they stepped clear from the Turbolift. 'Bones' had strong elements of the old man I'd met along the rail line, though I didn't see this at the time. Spock was pure Leonard Nimoy, except... he was ill. He moved stiffly, staring straight ahead, and there was doubt that he was fit enough to go on the mission. Bones made a quip about a delirious Vulcan being more or less the same as a healthy human, and I smiled along.

It transpired that this was to be a sequel to the famous 'Mirror Universe' episode, where Kirk had travelled to a parallel dimension to discover bloodthirsty alternate versions of the Enterprise crew. At some point, he'd delivered a report to Starfleet and this was their response; we filed into the conference room, those familiar walls, the tri-screen computer on an elbow-favouring desk.

The only other occupant was a female admiral. She was beautiful, in an unnerving kind of way. She owned the screen, completely distracting the viewers from Shatner and co., which was one of the clever things they often used to do with Star Trek guest stars. Along came the incidental stock music denoting, 'beautiful, mysterious stranger', notwithstanding the fact that I was certain I'd seen her somewhere before -a moot point once she'd explained about her security restrictions. She was obliged to use a holographic scramble-mask which perpetually altered her facial structure by ten percent.

A very involved discussion started, about the technical side of things: transporter frequencies, warp output, EPS flow, etc.; my mind went, 'tick-tock', 'tick-tock'. This discussion evolved, though, into something more philosophical. That presence-of-a-beautiful-woman asking me, hadn't it been so incredibly unpleasant to see my comrades as bloodthirsty tyrants, that I'd felt compelled to remain in that mirror universe to try and reorientate them towards goodness and equity?

I said something -smiling just like Shatner at his disarming best, though my heart wasn't in it.

Now she was starting to discuss things with Spock. She asked him what his conclusions were about the Mirror Universe as it pertained to traditional Heisenbergian physics. Wasn't it tantamount to a God-proving coincidence that, in a universe that had diverged from ours roughly three centuries ago, fate had still been ordered in such a way to allow a _certain_ crew to meet again on a _certain_ frontier Starship?

Spock, as I said, was ill. The hoods of his eyes, heavy at the best of times, struggled to blink their way through the ugly philosophy. He said something like, "You're forgetting, Madam Admiral, the precedent which was set by the creation of universe itself, surely the greatest coincidence of all? It follows that any subjective observer has no choice but to view any subsequent coincidences as wholly explicable".

This was a good answer, she conceded. The only answer a pragmatic secularist could give. The female admiral, however, subscribed to a more religious view. The infinity of parallel universes were arranged each with its own particular frequency of good or evil. For all anyone knew, it was the sole reason 'evil' had _ever_ existed, as a kind of quantum-dynamic disease osmosed through an infinite chain. In any case, all forthcoming missions into parallel universes would have the primary objective of marking transporter frequencies and using them to slowly plot a cosmic course _away_ from evil. Away from our own universe, even, and towards the parallel reality where 'implicate good' held court.

The Enterprise crew, she told us, was being sequestered for a new mission, to explore every parallel universe until we'd found such a range of good and evil that the transporter frequencies could be 'calibrated' to implicate good, whereupon a mass exodus could take place to Heaven.

Breaking a shocked silence, Spock enquired archly, "And how is it possible to tell absolute good from absolute evil? One can scarcely believe that evil will be so easily identified as mere violence or oppression".

"Mr Spock", the Admiral was imperious by equal measure, "you've answered your own question. Evil will be identified by the nuance of your heart, by the knowledge that life is insidiously refined to favour conceit, greed and injustice, in such a way that anyone conscious will feel utterly alone even in a density of overpopulation. Life there will be intolerable, not through anything as childish as physical pain, but by an uncomprehending, arch-capitalist society".

At all this, Spock merely raised an eyebrow, under the circumstances the bravest reaction anyone could give to such a bleak vision.

The briefing went on for a little while more; Kirk raised concerns about his crew, much the same way he did during that 'Taste of Armageddon' episode when he'd received equally zany orders. But by that time, my dreaming mind was tumbling forward, gobbling down the situations and scenarios in huge chunks.

I stood on the transporter pad, ready to be materilaised into some morally-unknown universe. Should I assume a fighting stance? Should I have my phaser drawn, and if so, should it be set to stun or kill? Obviously, being me, I favoured the bleaker option and assumed an itchy-trigger, shoulder-barging, ready-to-fight-the-world stance. At which point, it would have been very easy to get annoyed with Mr Scott, due to his slow and over-sensitive handling of the transporter console. We all know that iconic stance he takes; hands close together on the slide-levers as he stares intently at the officers in the materialisation booth. Presumably this was because the process was so tentative, and the tracking of our atoms so closely buffered, that we could be delicately eased back if anything went wrong -reference that frightening 'Cronenbergian' sequence in Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Not the case here, though. In a piece of implicate dream-logic, I came to understand that what Scotty was actually doing was regulating the amount of alcohol entering my blood stream; for some reason, the mission required me to get completely drunk. I started to worry. I equated it with the painful words of the record-player girl, 'I don't want it. It only dehydrates you'.

But no sooner had I started to worry than the transporter effect burred around me, inside me, permeating throughout my soul. Those transient, deep-flowing beads danced as ever, but they were now such different colours; a glowing green, a red, a blue, a white. Soon I realised: these were the colours of holy night, Christmas night. So many eye-grabbing bulbs in someone's modest, festive display.

From the other side, I started to sense -magic. A feeling of implicate, super-discerning love. A necessary understanding of all the suffering I'd ever felt, plus a mysterious, perfect response to it. Resonant greens and reds seemed to be flowing directly _from_ my weightless limbs and into a universe of -I don't know. The name 'God' sums up its cleverness and omnipotence, but makes it sound much too impersonal. Just 'love' sounds hippyish. The universe itself was proud of me.

I struggled to free myself from the transporter beam and step clear into the new world. An eternity of peace and satisfaction -the most 'real' thing I'd ever known- awaited not millimetres beyond the tangled whirring of the transporter beads. A multitude of stories and daydreams coalesced massively like some conceptual kaleidoscope, with myself the anchor-point to keep it all steady. I struggled forward-

And awoke. Bitterly disappointed to find myself once again a flesh-and-blood mortal on a stupidly doomed world.

Enter the first example of my 'death-wish' getting the better of me. A Triffid could be heard nearby, chancing its hand on the steep grass banks above the rail line. I walked directly towards the clicking and whipping, soon to kill it with some nominal, mechanical sweeps of my sword. In quick succession, I killed a second creature and a third, nothing except Daredevil zen informing me that I was safe from being blinded or bullwhipped.

It occurred to me for the first time that the Triffids were a manageable threat. Their huge armies, our weakened state, the social breakdown of the human race -it had beguiled us into morbid, jittery fear like a GP mentioning cancer during a routine check-up. Several times, I deliberately made an awkward movement in slashing a trunk, in such a way that the creature was not too far from gagging out some blinding crystals, or snapping off a concise little strike with its poisoned tongue. But even then, I only had to use the _tiniest_ bit of concentration to land an incapacitating strike across its main bud.

I moved among them like a light dispelling shadows, and always it was so. Unchallenged capitalism had brainwashed us and made our priorities wildly stupid. Like some deceitful Book of Revelations anti-messiah, Prime Minister Okorbo had been universally praised for the 'Living Wage Plus' initiative, for renationalising the trains and adopting a nationwide zero-tolerance on racism and discrimination. But you could still play 'Things-politicians-say-to-be-loved' bingo and win a full house every time. The rich were forever allowed to do not-very-much in order to become rich, while the new dynamic that _anyone_ could now _choose_ to be rich was fully in play. Witness each child encouraged to go to university or take a pretentious apprenticeship, as if Okorbo was Moses leading huddled masses from Egypt -never mind the false economy based on a countryload of conceited, over-qualified monsters. The service industry just about scraped by. But all other economic endeavors? Monsters preyed upon the blind and vice-versa: it had been quantitative easing applied to hard work and morality, and now we'd inherited a burnt-out world.

I would have felt sorry for the Triffids, if I'd been sensitised to _anything_. A kind of noxious grease covered my hands, either their stupid chlorophyll blood or else some kind of glandular build-up from where they were primed for a fight. Perhaps it was the very poison from their bullwhips. I didn't care. I just wanted to either die outright or exhaust myself in order to sleep -and return to that place. The place with God.

Belly filled with bully beef, I read the last few pages of 'Winner Takes Nothing' by Ernest Hemmingway, then -slightly crazily- started the whole thing again from the very start. I went to bed at exactly the same time, all in order to recreate the heavy sleep that had led to my dream.

And Sod's Law, I dreamt of nothing.

The next day -yet another mindless dance with the acres of Triffids, their ability to gain the upper hand existing only in theory, if I stopped moving. My heartbeat seemed to rely on the rhythm of sudden, jarring sword thrusts. Skinny ones dithered and fell. Fat ones dithered and fell. No one could deny it was an exact philosophical parallel to any British town or city centre since the mid-nineties. Look, there's a fat, middle-aged man in a check shirt. There's probably a good reason he's not at work in the middle of the day, right? Look, there's five hipsters that look like barbers from Dubai. There's probably a good reason they're not at work in the middle of the day, right? Right? Right? They'd all be destroyed in the end, and it would be hugely unpleasant.

It was a bitterly cold winter afternoon, something told me around 3pm. The sunset made me of think of a huge discharge of indelible colour sinking to the bottom of an already murky water tank. It was beautiful, but also strikingly bleak. It made me think I was seeing another world, but really? Even if you're with someone you love, what can you actually say to them? You want to transmit your whole consciousness into their mind and vice-versa. But if so, what's the point of this singular, localised consciousness we've got at the moment, and these horrible, pained living conditions? I think I'd defend it, even after my torturers showed me that the physical world is just an insidious predator of everything that's good.

Dreams are the third way.

On the low earthen bank behind me, a Triffid was collapsing its legs into a striking pose. Three or four of his mates were also starting to move petrifyingly close to my personal living space. I killed them in a quick maneuver which I could hardly feel because my limbs were numb -and I wouldn't like to say how close I came to death. I sensed the dream-harbouring recesses of every dank ditch and misty hedgerow. On the way back to my own little grotto, not a single Triffid could be seen along the tight little farming strips of Upper Didaton, though the horizon would surely hold secrets whenever there was a glimpse of it. Didaton Village itself was about forty acres behind me, and I tried to avoid it at all costs. Grey ranks of abandoned houses were bleak, and walking among them would forever infect the soul with a surreal, head-spinning futility.

It was that period of deep winter when you'd have no choice but to make a campfire, even if there was the danger of the smoke giving your position away to enemies. You could try to dispel the plume by constructing it under some trees, or just inside the confines of an old structure, but I'm not sure that was ever a reliable tactic. Notwithstanding, I'd trained myself to be aloof; fear of the waking world couldn't be allowed to contaminate my dreams.

There was also this: at some point during my hours of fighting, I'd had the brainwave of how to _truly_ coax my brain back into the dream. I'd read the same book, gone to sleep at exactly the same hour, but how on Earth could I recreate the earthquake that had woken me up half way through the night? My kingdom for an alarm clock. But then I thought, did I necessarily need to wake, or just have something that would give my sleeping mind a kick? I took a kingsize Gobstopper and used my pozidrive to gouge a hole in it. Into the hole, I injected some of the Record-Player-Girl's coffee, figuring that my stomach would dissolve the gobstopper sometime in the early hours and then release the caffeine into my system. The tiny hole I filled-in with a single Tic-Tac, the ghosts of a billion hipster housewives watching me on the last primetime cookery show before the End of the World. Maybe it would work. Maybe it would merely work as a placebo, on a psychosomatic level -like everything.

I was swept up into a thousand stories. One of them took hold. Have you ever had a dream where the plot is dazzling, and the sense of reality is dazzling -but still less dazzling than the philosophy that underpins it _all_?

We were on a huge, capital spaceship. On the wall-size window, a sun was in the process of going supernova, its core swelling outwards to engulf moons, planets, spaces stations, ships. Soon it would destroy us. The war between the rebels and the totalitarian Federation seemed to cease, or else hold its breath while something even more suspenseful took place.

In my sprawling dreamworld, I realised I was both watching -and taking part in- a special episode of 'Blakes 7' from the 80's. 'Special' because it was some kind of 'last episode plus', filmed live, completely free of dialogue and Red-Buttoned-to-death. Live TV dramas are always a gimmick, but the 'no dialogue' thing? Blakes 7 was famous for its realistic wordplay, the way it brought out knifes-edge political ambiguity. Would it work _at all_ without the characters openly criticising each other? Dallas held nothing to the way Blakes 7 had so many differing moral agendas. Maybe 'The World at War' came close.

Guess which character I was. It wasn't the hero Tarrant.

While Jenna simply strided away, Cally angrily grabbed my sleeve in an attempt to impel me back to the Scorpio, far off on some exploding hangar deck. I queasily smiled at her, having finally won some moral highground that friendship-during-wartime is just a masochistic conceit. From behind a waist-high rank of computers, Villa presented a similarly existential position. He stared at me, strangely innocent. Some tiny problem behind his eyes suggesting that he'd started to associate the whole of reality with we seven aboard the Scorpio, and Blake's moral superiority an ever-present ghost. How would he live without us? But in the end, he simply pulled tight his lips and fled.

Federation officers and rebel fighters alike scrambled for the nearest exit. Turning my head sharply, I observed the system-wrecking pandemonium that was always at play on the viewscreen. Sometimes it used latter-day special effects, bringing to mind the deck-blazing CG suns of 'Stargate Universe', 'Sunshine', the Voyager flying through the middle of a solar flare as Jerry Goldsmith made you care. Other times -and somehow far more unnerving- the supernova was represented in authentic 80's blue screen, complete with slow-motion spaceships-on-strings and VT feedback so heavy they might as well not have bothered. Because, yes, all physical reality is controlled by the Devil, and he loses nothing by letting you know. Look at that tiny, doomed shuttlecraft, probably sequestered by some harried BBC props man from 'Galloping Galaxies' or 'Moonbase'. Everything is overly-ornate, and doomed, like your mind.

I only cared about the destruction with the same oblique fascination I've always felt for death. Mild, pragmatic curiosity. Of course, Avon being Avon, there was never a moment where I didn't look strangely confident, and this milieu was matched exactly by my arch-enemy when she eventually joined me in the chamber.

Alone, Servalan luxuriated in the orange glow, the calmness-versus-calamity. As ever, she was beautiful, so skillful in her sensual eye-contact that a good man could turn bad in barely a second.

But there was something else. I stared at the pattern of her dress. The shape was modelled roughly after a Triffid, with the stalk area re-appropriated for the figure-hugging plaid of her torso and waist. Somewhere between futuristic herringbone and silk-embroidered velvet, the whole thing was so meticulous and detailed it could mean only one thing.

'This is far too detailed to be a dream', I thought to myself. 'This is really happening'.

Servalan noticed the sparkle in my eye and mistook it for plain old 'reacting-to-a-beautiful-woman' dazzle. She looked to the heavens in coy-affected delight, Josef Lorenzl pose straight from the bygone-bygone.

Jaquelin Pearce as Servalan in 1982. Some pubescent boys walk past a lingerie shop on a sunny day and for the rest of their lives have a thing about stockings or corsets. For me, the unthinking obsession with super-short hair was imprinted by that intergalactic despot, always there at the centre of poised spider-web of political chicanery.

Now, her chief ally with the eyepatch had long since scarpered into an escape pod, and I wondered how it was that she was satisfied to be alone and doomed, so far removed from any political power-housing. She wasn't loitering here with me because we were in love. Not exactly. Love is a form of brinkmanship, no more satisfying than politics, war-mongering, annexation.

We drew close. The cavernous bulkhead groaned along with a fresh lance of dangerously swollen orange, shading her face in the most unusual way. Her quizzical smile. Servalan was never the type of woman to exhibit needfulness or longing. For the first time, I noticed a small device in her hand. I wondered if it was some sort of doomsday-weapon remote control, and maybe _she_ was actually controlling the super-nova. Next, and weirdly, I wondered if it was some kind of flick-knife primed to stab me; this was more her style.

We embraced, as loving as two such jaded souls ever can be. And it wasn't a knife. I felt the motion of her thumb as it clicked behind my head, activating a portable teleporter to materialise us away from the disintegrating ship. The transport process was much the same as in the previous dream, but without the mystical, all-encompassing presence of God. Now I had to make do with the warmth and slinkiness of an evil space empress, and maybe there's a difference.

Onto the surface of a beautiful, tropical planet. In the night sky -tens-of-millions of miles removed, but presumably at a safe distance within the same system- the supernova continued to rage, albeit at the size of a fifty pence coin from our safe perspective. Tingling heat moved closely on our bodies, still moderate compared to where we'd just been; Servalan swayed in my arms as if to examine in detail the friction of the air pressure; rough, buoyant, sexually entwined with alien gravity. Her beautiful eyes quested me, quite innocently, I believed -except, for an unrepentant warlord to show innocence, a price surely has to be paid somewhere. I considered how to react for just a second or two, then settled on an open-minded smile -perhaps it was the first time since the start of the war that Avon didn't mind not being fully in control. Like some clever teenage romance, I found the face of my love-interest less than inch from mine, yet coyly refusing to hone in on a kiss.

It was me who committed to a full-on love-affair maul. A few seconds inside of which, I heard the hand-held teleporter click once more.

We were back on board the disintegrating ship, and disintegrating _how._ Swathes of orange haze swept away the hull above our heads, so disorientating and delirious it was hard to tell if the rending was soft or violent. Every piece of prefabricated decking on every level below could be felt crinkling in at our feet. Hushed air whooshed everywhere -someone mutes the TV just as a man appears on screen howling, still you sense the sonorous dread. Our vision, certainly, became sharper, even if the colours were a mottled, burnt blue, a sickly red.

Servalan, to her credit, gave away some genuine emotion. Flickering eyes informed me, quite deliberately, 'There was nothing more. This was all we ever had'.

The ship exploded, and we died. It seemed childish to believe that she'd managed to depress the teleportation button one last time. Certainly, it wasn't at all how I accounted for the fact that I was still incarnate and corporeal. I knew that I'd died and apparently gone to a variety of afterlife that was very much like -the Atlantic Ocean. The most turbulent, shipwreck-survivor-baiting sea you could ever meet in a cold sweat nightmare. Swollen eddys consumed every square inch, and how far below the surface my flailing and jerking body was, impossible to tell.

Soon, however -surreally- I realised that I wasn't getting wet. Similarly, where my eyes cast around to find a scrap of daylight that might denote 'up', there was in fact a brightness which emanated from multiple and _infinitesimal_ angles. I was in some colossal children's playpit, only nowhere near the kind you saw in pubs and leisure centres with the coloured balls. What engulfed me -an infinite amount of Christmas fairy lights, all somehow operating independently of any electrical wires. Obviously, within a few seconds or two, a fierce little worry gripped me that, because of all my flailing, some of the glass might break and scratch-up my body. Perhaps, though, it was obvious from the start that I was only in emotional danger, not physical. Air permeated the density of those green, red and blue bulbs, even if I had to purse my lips incredibly tightly to avoid sucking anything in.

I flailed for some time -I don't like to think about how long. It seemed horribly likely that there might be _nothing_ elsein this universe except the unearthly sea of Christmas lights, obviously a clever, subconscious metaphor for death versus dark political Lebensraum. At no point did I get a hint of daylight, not until, inexorably, a small pair of hands seized me and started to drag me clear. Tranquil-purple atmosphere filled my gaze as the tiny bulbs chinked away onto a long beach -conventional except that yellow glitter had replaced the sand en masse.

My rescuer was the Starfleet Admiral. She put her hands on her smalls-wearing hips, regarded me excitedly, as I did her.

"Heaven?", I wondered.

"What does your intuition tell you?"

It was a beautiful, palpably calm landscape. Triffids were present, but they were rooted in the ground and trumming like happy, semi-anthropomorphised Looney Tunes. Just the sort of novelty your mother would have found cute in an 'and finally' news story. Those tight, gramophone petals faced the invigorating purple sky - as the girl and I did likewise, padding up the beach towards the crest.

The leaves of the palm trees were made of multi-colour tinsel. The coconuts were made of giant chrome baubles.

"It's Christmas", I noted.

"Yes it is", she drew close and stared at me.

"I'll be alright, as long as there's no music. They programmed me to go insane".

"You'll be OK. All of us have things to tie-up".

She explained to me that she was still wearing the holographic scramble-mask, which perpetually disguised her face by a factor of ten percent. Now the mission was over and we'd found Heaven, she could finally be herself again. Marching to the nearest rock, she knelt low and started to violently headbutt the jagged edge. Obviously, I moved to stop her, insisting that it wasn't necessary -that she was beautiful, reference even _my_ unreasonably high standards.

"They're not unreasonably high, and you haven't seen beautiful like s-".

She continued to blindly, savagely attack her face with a rock, to the point where it dripped with blood. Afterwards, oily-red sheen notwithstanding, I was breathless -and it's completely redundant to try and explain how beautiful she became. It would be easier for me to describe God.

"Shall we get on with it?", she laughed. "I know what we need to do now".

Just across the other side of the beach -it was like some paradisal, Pacific strip- lay a huge fresh water lake. The expanse was surreally motionless considering how distant the other side was, not even allowing a subtle tide or hairline ripples. On a nearby curve, we saw several other people kneeling down to stare into the water; June Sarpong the television presenter was there, though it was clearly my associate who was the centre of attention. She took the bloodied rock and, holding it clear, gently released it into the dusky depths.

There was no splash, and we watched it ease down to the bottom at a wholly hypnotic speed. From the corner of my eye, I saw more people had arrived to look into the water, chief among them a man with very tufty, grey hair and a reassuringly serious face. He wore some kind of mechanical exo-suit to help him walk, and how do you like that?

Said my ally, "Whatever happens, don't turn around".

Ahead were the shadows of our hunched shoulders on the surface of the water. And then, moving heavily in the sand, the deep-brown silhouette of a colossal lion padded almightily into our midst. I felt his presence at my back, but more than that, I saw the reflection of a giant head behind my own quivering shadow.

The lion's seven glowing eyes stared out across the water. Seven glowing eyes without even the tiniest outline of a mouth. When my curiosity got the better of me and I turned around to look, I saw that actually, face-to-face, he only had two eyes. But back to the surface of the lake -seven burning orbs set within a stark feline mask, examining the water, scouring deep for some kind of secret plan.

My beloved clutched my hand in readiness, and I couldn't understand exactly why. Soon, however, the water of the lake started to lurch into a colossal drain. We waded in excitedly.

"Didn't you dream all of this once?", she asked, in response to my almost crippling sense of wonder.

In the beautiful heavens, there was no moon and no sun, but in their place, an ominous pink-lined cloud which produced a clattering rain of millions upon millions of shopworker name tags. I noticed that some of them, tumbling close across the waist-deep water, were covered in dried blood. But soon they'd simply vanished, along with the water itself, completely dried out on the lake bed.

There was no moon and no sun, but in their place, an ominous pink-lined cloud masked three revolving meteors. One was shaped like an open-mouthed grizzly bear, another was shaped like a wavy, ceremonial knife, the third looked like a chiseled star. These meteors each corresponded to vast, predating Triffids moving steadily across the lake bed. Each one was ten stories high, and it seemed hopeless to think that their methodical radar wouldn't detect us on such open ground.

"They've accounted for everything except our luck", explained my girlfriend. "And what is God except the ultimate form of luck? You know in your dreams, when all you've got to rely on is your luck? We'll make it if we run".

Indeed; gliding in a sprint past their stiff, angular legs, we discovered that once we were clear, they really did forget about us. The centre of the lake held three ancient statues embedded in the ground, back-to-back. King Alfred. Thomas Paine. The Ri Tuaithe of Dounreay. Each had an out-stretched palm, and I wondered why. To entice rain? We circled around the stoical old statues for a good few minutes.

My beloved asked me if I had any fifty pence coins. This seemed to be an incredibly odd question to ask of a mortal man freshly arrived in the afterlife, but it was clear that she didn't have any money herself, fan-boyed out in a Dr No swimsuit as she was. Myself, I sported a naked torso but with classic black jeans, the pockets of which contained mounds of silverware.

I handed her three fifty pence coins, each carrying a specific date:

2018.

2027.

2100.

She held them in front of my squinting eyes, saying, "Each one of these will become the first cities of Heaven".

And the coins she placed in the outstretched palms of each statue.

Next, from around the base of one of the statues, she palmed up some dew and used it to wash the blood from her face. I shook my head and smiled a little. She smiled a lot. I got to frowning. She wrinkled her mouth, totally dismissing my ennui.

"This is just a weird, protracted dream, but I still don't want to wake", I told her.

"It's not _just_ a dream", she insisted. We looked at each other with a kind of magnetic tingle that emphasised just how unprecedented the detail of this dream actually was. Explaining, there was a reason why the balance of reality between waking life and dreams was becoming inverted. As life in ultra-bourgeois, war-and-Triffid-ravaged Earth became increasingly intolerable, it was our adventures in dreams which would slowly rekindle our faith in the feasibility of -existence itself.

Speaking grimly, from the heart, I told her I really didn't think this was possible. I was too jaded by half.

Except, "It _is_ possible. The mitochondria-friction generated by our brains still conducts ju-ju on the macrogram whether we're awake or dreaming".

She fell to her knees in the small patch of ground at the centre of the statues and started to dig, explaining that beneath the dirt was a long-buried time machine. With it, we could correct whatsoever in the world had damaged us or made us ashamed.

"Capitalism".

"Yes".

"We finesse the timeline in such a way that Marxism takes over the world. But how?"

She continued to manhandle the earth, and I started to help her. The thick soil was just-about diggable, therefore utterly tacticle and pleasing to the touch. I could feel the pulpiness across the joints of my fingers, but somehow there was no fear of such an abstract feeling jarring me awake.

"There are numerous ways, I suppose", said my beautiful Joan of Arc figure. She was starting to sweat, almost-but-not-quite developing a sexy-looking sheen. Into blue sky thinking -there was a certain train of logic that said that the world had needed Stalin's particular brand of totalitarian communism in order to defeat the Nazis. She didn't buy it. Stalin, paranoid mass-murderer or not, had been strangely intellectual and sensitive in a way that few other war-time leaders could claim, and there was a slim chance we could tame him. Chairman Mao was a harder proposition, but equally susceptible for philosophical shock-and-awe. Failing that, there were numerous times in history when communism had failed to press its advantage, more often than not a failure to explain itself. The Cuban missile crisis. Tiananmen Square and Kim Philby. In fact, there was even a flaw in Marx himself, in the rejection of religion. Imagine, she said, the edge that we'd have if the discipline of Catholicism or Islam was spliced with the logic of Communism: the adventures of the Russians in Afghanistan alone would make a new world power.

It all boiled down to an assumption that the Communists were being militaristic or confrontational just for the sake of it, never that capitalism was working from an un-winnable, perpetually apocalyptic low ground.

Put your faith in communism and there's a slim, _slim_ chance that we can prevail against the inherent, insidious laziness of the human race. Put your faith in capitalism, and -by definition- you're an utterly disposable slave, whether to your paymasters or your own aggrandised conceit.

I was kissing her with all kinds guilt-free, porno-style face-eating. At which point, she braced my shoulders and glared with terror over my shoulder.

A ring of six Triffids had completely encircled us and were closing in at a distance of well inside five metres.

"Carry on digging", I told her. "But quickly".

When I was a kid, I had an ancient, hide-bound copy of Tarzan -just a wonky old treasury copy, though I loved it as much as a first edition signed by Conan Doyle himself. One of the lithographs showed an insanely skinny Tarzan leaping mid-air to take down a snarling lion. He was snarling, but clearly not expecting such a wild, pre-emptive strike.

I flew, Victorinox drawn, and knocked the furthest monster into a groundward lurch. I wounded it, then relied on sheer spider-sense to tell me how quickly the sonar of the others had maneuvered them around to get me. A bullwhip tendril waved loosely in mid air in a kind of emergency man-grab, and out of a dozen permutations, I chose to stab wildly at its mouth. Surprisingly forceful arches of their legs made me duck cowardly, slash wildly. In all, luck-beyond-luck told me to quit while I was ahead, and I rushed for that slanted little sight on the horizon, my spirit-guide frantically digging out the Time Machine.

No progress had been made in exposing the actual shape, but her hands had scoured-out a bathroom window sized opening in the dirt. She flicked up her eyes to check I was coming, then slid down into the god-mysterious dark. Following, I scraped my body into the murk, to discover no gleaming control room, and in fact nothing that was less than complete medieval dark.

She explained that the toroidal nodes would begin to power-up automatically now that the sensors had detected pilots. Triffids shuffled stupidly above, before the tiny airlock magically resealed itself, leaving us in darkness ala the most ponderous isolation tank.

"That's not good", I warned her. "I think I actually need to see things in order to keep my mind stimulated and still dreaming. This has already been the most protracted dream of my life. I could wake at any moment".

Her voice resounded in the darkness, though. "But you'll come back here. This world is full of truth and meaning. How could it fail to become more real and more powerful than the cursed place you'll wake up in?"

All the same, I complained in no uncertain terms that I really didn't want to wake. I couldn't face it. There in the mysterious darkness, we semi-disembodied souls descended into a dry silence that was by far the most surreal thing I'd ever known. Lucid dreaming starting to show off; and we don't need anything as gaudy as multi-dimensional space or magazine-advert visuals. My soulmate's pulse was beginning to race as she figured out how to take the edge off my waking-up.

"Has any dream-character ever told you such a good joke that you woke up immediately, laughing away like a crazy boy?"

"No", I replied softly.

She said, "One day, God walks into a bar and says to the barman -I can't do the accent- 'I'll have a double whiskey'. The barman says, 'Nuh-uh. Not until you tell me why you made us all suffer. Y'know, disproportionately, a dozen times more than was needed to spell out even the most sophisticated spiritual message'. God complains that he's had a hard day, and all he wants is the whiskey, but the barman is adamant. God reaches into his pocket and pulls out a string of Christmas lights, and while the barman is mesmerised, he surreptitiously reaches over the bar and pours the whiskey himself.

"The next day, God comes back in the bar -hat on the side of his head- 'I'll have a double whiskey'.

"'Not likely', says the Barman. 'You know what I want'.

"Rolling his eyes, God realises that he can't put it off any longer and laboriously explains the rationale for human suffering, y'know, over the course of three hours or so. At one point, he has to draw a complicated diagram of sub-atomic particles. At one point, he weeps with regret.

"Finally, when he's finished, he makes long, guilty eye contact with the Barman.

"I didn't really expect you to tell me about the suffering. All I was asking for was the money for yesterday's drink. But yeah. While you're here, sort your planet out, mate".

Cxs.

I awoke to a freezing cold atmosphere, not exactly laughing but deeply enthralled. I hardly thought about the joke itself, more impressed by the fact that, seemingly just seconds ago, I'd been staring across at the most philosophically-perfect girl imaginable. She hadn't looked like anyone I'd met in real life. She hadn't seemed like an amalgam of past girlfriends or film stars, either.

My little camp was white-silver with frost, from the chamo windbreaker to the thick bungees which raised my groundsheet, normally kingfisher blue. I moved to scoop up some dry firewood from the zip-bag, but was immediately stung by the burning, swollen sensation in my ears. This was well-known to me. I was about to be ill, laid up for a day while my body rebooted. It happened at least once every winter, but afterwards I always felt as good as new.

In the meantime, how dearly I would've loved to sketch that pretty dream-girl, except my hands were too weak. Soon I'd forgotten exactly what she looked like, and was left only with the feeling. It was all I could do to scoop up some kindling and bring the fire back to life. I then tried to write down the bullet-points of the dream, but on reading them back they were unintelligible -not that I'd forget, anyway.

My camp was in a hooded little dell inside the strut-shape of a wall that'd been raggledy-ancient even before the apocalypse. Pale, marble-effect holly leaves offered a kind of giant eyelash over the frozen landscape; as I lay there in my convalescence, I carefully scanned the horizon for Triffids -though this was just a clever side-operation of my stand-by mode, no conscious thought necessary. Maybe I'll admit to a certain amount of delirium. Mostly I was filled by a solid truth: as you used to hear stories of seventeenth century man-and-boy fishermen going insane from spending too much time on the land, I was losing it from being removed from that profound and mescal-sharp dream. It owned me. I could no more think about anything else than I could decide to stop breathing.

A stranger appeared. Zoned-out, my delirious eyes detected him only at the last possible moment.

Maybe I'd programmed them to wake my conscious mind only if they saw Triffids, and multiple Triffids at that. In any case, it was far too late to go on red alert now. Barely-widening eyelids took in the sight of a clean-shaven man on horseback, standing bolt still at the entrance of the dell, staring quite intently. I wondered if he was trying to decide if I was dead or not, tho I soon realised he knew all along -he was trying to decide how to make the meeting seem 'nice', 'honourable', 'empathic'.

"It's OK. I'm here to help".

I knew it would take a breathy run-up to get my voice to project. The result was impressive, tho, and went some way to giving me a working amount of consciousness _. "I -don't- want- help!"_

"You're ill. You won't make it through another night".

Now, I hated not having enough energy to shout the truth that I'd been ill dozens of times, and had always pulled through the next day. It was nothing. Especially frustrating was the way he held his stupid, clean-shaven head so utterly still, forward-facing, not even inclining an ear the better to listen to my rasps.

" _If you think I look ill, that's fine_ ", I told him. I then grasped the hilt of my sword. "Why don't you step up and meet General Grievous?"

The clean-shaven man blinked at this warning, otherwise remaining dispassionate. He rippled the reigns of his horse and trotted away.

But I was worried now. Partly that he'd come back, partly that the motion of the hooves on the earth had alerted the Triffids. I stared at the silent winter landscape, at some point feinting away to the deepest, most effortless state of unconsciousness. And how.

CS.

Snapping on and off, there was no rhyme or reason for when my consciousness became active again. There was either full awareness or nothing at all, and what I saw when my eyes focused was almost too much to process. The clean-shaven man had captured me and I was strapped upright on his charging horse -but at least not slung over the side like a John Marsden bounty. As we pounded across a high embankment, I saw other horse-riders beside me. A woman who looked like Amelia Airheart. Further out across the channel, I saw soldiers firing automatic weapons into some truly towering Triffids.

This was more people than I'd ever expected to see again by a factor of six or seven.

Then, near full power all of a sudden, I found myself cable-tied to the side-rail of what looked like a military bedspread. The exotic shape of the wall above my head also suggested just one thing: the bulkhead of a sleek corvette or cruiser. My sword was gone. Everything I had was gone, and I was far from reassured by the way someone had snuggled me into a thick, clean duvet.

At the foot of my bed was a large halogen heater, and something about it scared me on a nigh-supernatural level. It was working! Somehow the internal circuitry had survived the rot in the atmosphere that had so decimated all the other electrical items in Britain. Always assuming I was still _in_ Britain.

Because this ship of mine was moving. A kind of spry, water-cutting rumble edged in at the rubber-coated deck. I carefully screened this out in order to listen for any lurking enemies in the cabins beyond. Not a single guard passed by, and believing this to be just temporary good luck, I knew rapid action was the order of the day.

Hauling over the entire cot, I awkwardly dragged my cable-tied wrist alongside the heater, and rested the grip on the element until it melted. The burns to my skin were negligible, or in any case, I managed to stifled a wail. Now, looking around for any kind of weapon, there seemed to be absolutely nothing, not even a fire extinguisher. A kind of tense, internal crying took hold of my brain, until I realised I might be able to kink and free-up a section of the cot frame itself. I wielded it, examined the three foot length and the girth that was about half an inch thicker than a pool cue. Enough to fiercely incapacitate an enemy's limb.

For the first time, I edged around the fortified arch and looked along the tight corridor. The clanky deckplates would give away my escape in a second , so I wavered along the edge, always careful to dodge the engineering valves, the conduits, the transformers.

Daytrips to the Alliance at Portsmouth with my Dad, to the HMS Monmouth with Vichelle (my fascinated with the ship, she with the sailors) -these memories bothered me hardly at all as I moved through the lower decks in readiness of my assault-stroke-escape. Some very purposeful shrills suggested there was a sizeable number of crew on the port-side; sheer intuition told me to sneak towards them, while all along growing much more stealthy.

Everything was either labelled or hazard-marked, almost to the point of making an 'Idiots guide to running a Navy cruiser'. My natural lack of fear found new levels of dashing, past tight little engineering gantries and utility outlets. A certain airiness in the heavily-dimpled, outer-lying decks told me I was getting near to the most populated area of the ship. I gripped my section of bedstead, as delicately primed as a good piece of techno music.

Along from a galley, a metal-fused porthole allowed me to gaze into one of the living areas from relative safety.

A man in suit trousers and a heavy felt shirt was making himself a coffee. He finished pouring the water into his mug, but something made him freeze with the kettle still at an angle. He stared at the tiny counter in front of him, proceeding to become perfectly mindless. A metre or two across from him, a woman sat on a long, 'L'-shaped sofa reading the biography of a lady tennis star. Whether they were civilians or not, I immediately started to wonder at the odd, ambient lives these bizarro people led. A successive room had a balding, prim-faced man playing Rubix Cube, while his friends sat around a ceiling mounted TV showing 'The Fall', a show I dimly remembered being -slightly, slightly- above the standard of most hack detective dramas, while still having no reason to exist.

Anyway. Stooping low, I crept by out of sight towards the tall, shadowy struts that offered the best suggestion of daylight. The biggest scrape came when I tip-toed past a 'T' shape avenue and less than three feet from a man in a Royal Navy jumper ticking off stats on a clipboard. Now I was in a rush. Through a heavy pressure-door, my wild evasive action took me a good metre or two into some kind of operations room where a T-shirted man was working on a laptop.

He looked up. We just stared at each other for an inexplicable stretch of time, a finger raised to my psychotic lips as if to say, 'Not a f-ing word'. After which I heard him taking rapid little breaths -tho nothing that suggested he was in fear of his life. Maybe Mickey Adams having a nightmare about an extremely quick-moving game of chess.

There was no time to understand him; I simply sidled my feet across the deck as quickly as I could -but in doing so, the laptop man started to speak in a mechanical, A-tonal drawl.

 _"HE COMES WITHIN FIVE HUNDRED CENTIMETERS OF MY LAPTOP!"_

Was he making a live report to someone? Apparently not. As I moved further on my way, it became clear he was simply keeping some sort of mental tally of how close I came to his precious computer -and God knew why. " _HE COMES WITHIN SIX HUNDRED CENTIMETRES OF MY LAPTOP. HE IS NOW SEVEN-HUNDRED CENTIMTRES FROM MY LAPTOP_ ".

I rushed through the open pressure door on the far side of the chamber. There was a clear impression of the secondary-hull super-structure; a huge corner with a long window had been made dramatically dirty by sea vapour -though this was useless as a means of reaching the outside because it was all so tightly integrated. I paced through to another little door-

A slim, attractive woman was exercising on an upright walking machine. She faced the wall with her back to me -and immediately there was something in the dreamy incline of her head, the stress-free shoulders, that told me she wasn't the tiniest threat. All the same, a gun had lazily been left on a nearby work surface. I darted to pick it up.

In time, the tightness of her legs got the better of her, moving steeply into a kind of rangy stagger. She reached for a towel, turned to face me.

How to describe Emu, age thirty-five. An interesting problem. She was conventionally beautiful to the point where, at any time of the day, she looked like she was on a girl's-night-out to the flashiest nightclub. But then, there was also the girlish, probing intelligence in her brown eyes, belonging to some novel-writing teenage girl from the depths of the English countryside. The third factor; a large part of her skull was missing. The dent running from the right-hand temple was dramatically deep and at a sharp angle. At first sight, there was a suspicion that this was surely the severest damage a person can sustain to their head without losing the ability to think straight and function. Not so. As I got to know Emu, I soon realised that she'd also _gained_ something from her injury: a god-granted X-factor to see through my stupid darkness.

Her name, incidentally, is pronounced, 'EE-moo'. It's testament to her calm, deliberate personality that I've never heard anyone make any jokes about Emu the animal, or even mention it.

Hand touching the heavy grey towel, mauling the fabric without ever bringing it to bear on her head, she turned to face me -tho at no point struck down by fear.

"You're pointing a gun at me? There's no need for tha-at".

"You people abducted me", I pointed out.

"You were really sick? You wouldn't've lived much longer".

"I frequently got sick".

"I reckon you're really brave, you know, for survivin' out there so long. But you're amung friends now. You don't have to worry about being brave any more. This ship? It's like a little corner where the poc-poc-alypse nevver happened".

I couldn't place her accent. Somewhere between Bristolian and Essex. But what I noticed from the start -and what melted my heart- was that it belied an utterly carefree mindset. 'Poc-poc-alypse'; as soon as she'd spoken just one syllable, she'd known she wouldn't be able to annunciate the word, but had carried on as if it really didn't matter, as if she was reality itself.

Her soft blonde hair was gloriously straight, like something from an advert. Of course, it was necessary to tie the right-side straight back in order that it not flow higgledy over her damaged skull, but how wondrously prim and business-like she looked.

I glowered.

"I don't know whether I'm awake or dreaming. But I do know this: I'm not staying in this metal labyrinth. Where is the Captain?"

"That's a lo-ong story. The nearest we've got left is Petty Officer May. He's the only Navy bloke left on board. Everyone else is back at Faslane. Do you really not know wevver you're awake or dreamin'?"

"That's a long story, too".

I didn't particularly want it; this Hitchcockian, Cary-Grant-getting-to-know-the-heroine playfulness. I resisted it, but fate or the universe redoubled its efforts accordingly. For one thing, this strange, wonderful girl was not intimidated by the gun at all. I came to recognise by her slow movements that she was partially blind, whether from Triffid crystals or the almighty accident which had taken part of her skull. The gun seemed to be a playful matter, something to be toyed with in the corner of her eye, and plenty of times she was happy to forget about it altogether.

"I know about dreams, too. Look at these". On a small ledge, she showed me a long line of C-90 cassette tapes. "I have the weirdest, most long dreams? Only I can't see well enough to write them down in a journal, so I have to tape record 'em? The trouble is, I'm bloody runnin' out of tapes, and none of the others are interested enough to write them down for me. They pretend they are, but they aren't".

"Doesn't your boyfriend do it?"

"All of my mates and my old boyfriends are dead", she said, almost cheerful.

"I passed a dozen young guys as I was sneaking around. You're a beautiful woman. It doesn't make sense that at least one of them isn't hounding you for attention by any means necessary".

The woman frowned and looked into the middle distance, at nothing. Her legs, I noted, were quivering, as if her toes were constantly trying to drag the rest of her a few inches forward on the ground.

"Thankyou for saying I'm beautiful, even in spite of my head, but ...what do you mean?"

"I think you're just saying what you think will interest me, and this is a trap. Not necessarily by you, but by someone. I can't risk that you're not cannibals. I want out".

She rubbed her upper arms, swung her knees around.

"It's not a tra-ap. I don't have a boyfriend because everyone here has got -y'know, like- low libidos. Like, bad sex-drives? And we get most of our food by fishin'. We don't need to be cannibals. I'm just alone here because ...I don't know why".

I decided to say... "I'm sorry. But you have no idea how badly I want to leave".

"Maybe I'll change your mind".

I remember shaking my head gravely. "Just show me the way out".

"That might not be possible at the mo-ment?"

My new friend casually unclasped her hands like an Open University presenter, gesturing at nothing, then daintily moved across to what I now understood to be a heavily curtained porthole. She dragged down the cord to reveal a harsh, dramatic scene. Beyond the tumbling wake of the ship, we saw the vast cliffs of some anonymous British coastline gliding by on a parallel course to nowhere. On the narrow pebbled beach below, hundreds of Triffids meandered everywhere. On the cliffs above, their fifty foot counterparts completely blotted out a grim winter sky.

CSE.

Britain's last great conflict had been a war with many fronts and many logistical problems, not least of which the liberal government's own over-reactions. CRG guerillas had stormed so much of our infrastructure, -and this in tandem with the usual slag rioters and student hangers-on. Our national services had been falling apart anyway; the American Depression of 1930 had stared out across history and smirked as tens of thousands of unemployed office workers, without a pro-active work ethic to inform their self-worth, had flooded the NHS with their psychological problems like sullen, obstinate children. Famously, Okorbo's government had sued for mental health provisions to be given equal footing with _physical_ ailments, completely free of charge (tho hospital car parks now cost fifteen pounds an hour). And alas this presented one of the biggest headaches of the Civil War. Just like Russian provinces being mercilessly swallowed up in street-by-street Nazi advancements, our local governments hardly had any time to plan mass evacuations -still less time to make bold, moral decisions. Legally, even under martial law, the medical arm of the government had no choice but to give hospital patients suffering from psychological issues the same armed, military protection as people on ventilators, or doubled-up from cancer treatment. Lots of them, nobly, said no.

But horrifyingly, a lot of them had no problem having their domestic, based-on-nothing depressions fawned over by tax-payed psychologists, even as snipers had drawn beads on them through refugee encampment window-flaps.

Like some bizarrely left-wing version of Saving Private Ryan, high-ranking government officials refused to allow any family to suffer multiple psychological traumas, whether those traumas had been inflicted recently in an anarchic street battle -or years ago, before the war had even started; a yuppie becoming morose and melancholic because his little movie-projector-in-a-suitcase project couldn't get funding. A housewife getting postnatal depression because somehow she'd misinterpreted the most basic aspect of _her own mind,_ and an anonymous doctor must therefore have the answer.

After the bunker-ensconced government had given the order to unleash the Triffids in order to retake the country -and the Triffids had instead felled _everybody-_ all sighted citizens were required to take charge of huge gangs of the blind.

But even then, those certified 'mentally ill' had been delivered from any and all responsibility, including the responsibility for their own lives. The Saint Josephine was one of three frigates which had been ordered by Prime Minister Okorbo to deliver 'operating' psychiatric patients unscathed through this near-apocalypse. It was, he said, a precious mark of civilisation.

Emu introduced me to the dozens of disparate, depressed strangers who shared the ship with her. Vincent, a dour forty-something who described his pill-taking schedule as if it was some solemn Catholic ceremony. Megan, a woman who couldn't stop thinking about 9/11, as if it had anything whatsoever to do with her own life as a parochial English office worker.

It was around a little booth table in a silver-flecked corner that I felt particularly tense, however. Years in to the apocalypse, where not a day had gone by without suicidal gloom as far as the eye could see -suddenly before me was a insanely-smiling woman and a four-month-old baby.

"This Annette, and baby Robertson", said Emu.

I was almost speechless. "' _Robertson_ '?"

"I liked the name because it has such strong syllables", said the woman.

"Yeah", said I, "It's got strong syllables because it's a _surname_ , not a _first name_ ".

"Why are you being hostile about my baby's name?", Annette looked like she was going to put down the baby and punch me.

Waving my arms, just slightly, "I don't care what its name is. The point is, everyone's out there starving, and civilisation is ending, and you people are here watching hack detective shows and having sex".

I stormed away then, but from over my shoulder, I heard Emu apologising for me and explaining that I was really a good guy who'd simply been through too much stress. Once she'd skipped through the gantries to catch up with me, however, I could see that she was holding back some sweet, gleeful giggles.

Emu Backlestoke has a mischievous streak.

Clearly enough, she didn't see me as someone who'd been driven mad by long periods of isolation on a post-apocalyptic landscape. Admittedly, in a tiny cabin toilet, I'd cut my hair and shaved my Karl Marx beard to mere Tom Skerrit proportions. In the cabinet was a bottle of Dior Sauvage and a bottle of Acqua Di Gio. I splashed the Dior Sauvage on my torso and drank the Acqua Di Gio. Really, I felt the same old fear I'd had with Vichelle: she'd see the truth that I was either completely pathetic or wildly bitter -and it had to be one or the other.

"You've got to meet Gary. He's my favourite".

Except Gary and I had already met. In a radar room that had been reconditioned into a lounge, he sat there with his laptop, endlessly clicking through complex pages of code. To his credit, he seemed less perturbed that I'd steal his computer now that there were other people around.

"He's got an IQ of 145, but he's still afraid to play me at Scrabble".

Gary clicked away. Never looking round, not even surreptitiously glancing at the tightness of Emu's silk shirt ala any other flesh-and-blood male since time began. I've always secretly enjoyed competing with other men for the affection of pretty girls, and felt unnerved at having no competition here; I hereby apologise to you, Gary, if that coloured my first impression of you. To you, Grayson Perry, I apologise for using your arbitrary social analysis books as toilet paper and drinking Maker's Neat from your skull.

"What's that you're working on? Trying to hack in to something?"

Gary explained for a good few minutes about hacking servers, redirecting data streams, etc. It was just like when you hear a character in a film talking about computer hacking, always so confident but in ever-decreasing circles of jargon. In the end, though, he said something like, "The connection-protocol recorded the mainframe server commands at the time the unicode ceased uploading. If it was still an _actual_ feed, I'd be able to hack any secure site in the world".

I didn't understand any of it, really, but something about this sounded suspicious to me.

"If it was still active? What does that mean?"

Said Gary, "At the time of the collapse, the infrastructure of most server suites were recorded as unicode information bytes, as susceptible to cyber attacks as the real thing".

In the end, several moves later, I wheedled it out of him in layman's terms. He wasn't, in fact, hacking any _real_ websites. He was hacking dead, disconnected websites, where the skeletons of all the spod business people were collapsed across their keyboards like comatose Terrance-and-Phillip.

I confess I rubbed it in, "So let me get this straight, even if the Internet was still a running concern, what you're doing here has no practical purpose whatsoever?"

Gary either refused to answer or didn't understand the question. He carried on typing command prompts.

"No, that's fine", I said, before making a move for the pressure pad. "Can I have a go?"

He hissed like Mrs Robinson.

"OK, catch you later, mate".

'Catch you later' was what I felt like saying to all the people on that ship, with the obvious exception of Emu. For quite a while, I'd been labouring under the misconception that the head-wound had effected her psychology and her emotions, and she was just as much of an in-patient as the rest of them. This was not the case.

During the early days of the Civil War, like so many people, she'd been caught unaware by a huge crowd of Triffids that had escaped across the open landscape. She had no idea what it signified when they stooped low into their trademark 'firing cannon' pose. The floating crystals they expelled, she said, were absolutely beautiful. As she'd stared, there was no sense of the severe damage the resonant light was wreaking on her retinas. She would have gone completely blind if it hadn't been for a small dog tearing across her legs, stopping a few metres away and barking incessantly. She looked away, _continued_ to look away -as the people she was with started to yell and move randomly into the more populous areas of town. She'd been swept along, eventually tumbling down some steep underpass steps, whereupon a random good citizen had repeatedly beaten her head with a length of metal racking.

The NHS, by then, had collapsed. As if my a miracle, however, she was taken to a private hospital which had chosen to help any and all comers simply through the heightened morality of the individual doctors. A further miracle came in the fact that their Protectron Medical unit was still functioning and, in a ten hour operation, had managed to repair all the damaged blood vessels in her brain and tidy up the ragged mess that passed for her skull.

And then, inevitably, _this_ hospital too had fallen. A barely-recovered Emu had stumbled through the burning streets, alone...

Enter Clive Backlestoke DSO, DSC: her father and the original commander of the Saint Josephine. He'd disobeyed a direct order not to push ashore at a certain quayside, all in order to pick up his fleeing daughter. A few days later, he was shot dead by a sniper from the shore, and after that, what remained of Navy command hadn't had the heart to remove her from the last possible place in the world she could think of as home.

"I'm sorry", I wavered. "You've effected me. How do you like that?"

Emu stood bolt still, staring at nothing and no-one. She does that sometimes, and people mistake it for mindless vacancy -whereas if you quiz her about it afterwards, she's actually _on fire_ -half shameless daydreaming, half envisioning the best of all possible worlds.

"Emu? Can you hear me? What are you thinking about?"

Eventually, her red-lipsticked mouth quivered into life. "I think you should come to our Christ-mus Party. It's December Twenty Second now. I reck-un, if you agree no-oow, you'll have two more days to get excited about it -and gettin' excited about it is the best part".

"I don't do Christmas parties".

Nonplussed, "If you change your mind, I think Keith and Wally are on the top deck right now, running the Christ-mus lights through the jumping wire and the Bragg lines. It's going to look properly pretty?"

She proceeded to tell me how, among other members of the ships company, she'd watched over me while I was unconscious, feverish, muttering. Sometimes I'd actually give a hearty, full-lung shout, but still not enough to wake. During the first few hours alone, so many people had looked in on my forlorn REM adventures and immediately voted that I should be allowed to stay. On a Navy ship devoted purely to Mental Health patients, I surely in the right place.

Except.

"I'm not mentally ill", I told her.

"It's nuffin' to be ashamed of. I saw all the scars on your body. How could you not be mentally disturbed after being out there so lo-oong?"

"All the same", I spread my arms and shrugged.

"That man who found you? He may've bin wondrin' round like Mad Max, but he's actually a psychologist? If he thought you were totally still sane, you'd have been recruited into caring for one of the blind gangs at Portsmouth or Faslane".

"That might not have been such a bad idea. I'm a man with big ideas".

"Go on, then, tell me", she invited.

I found it extremely hard to put into words what I had to say. I didn't want her to hate me for telling the truth.

"The world was always a mad, evil place, long before the Civil War ever started. You can look at the raiders and the cannibals and say, 'Civilisation has fallen' -but we never had a civilisation to start with. There was only an _idea_ of civilisation that was actually a cover for pretentiousness, and greed, and laziness. All that, driving someone to mental illness? You can say it's nothing to be ashamed of, but look at the world we lived in. It was just ever decreasing circles ofsubconscious shame, no one ever seeing it".

Emu was silent for quite a while, with my own mind saying nothing except, 'I'll get me coat'. Eventually, though, she smiled -a proud smile that suggested that, actually, what I'd said was just a small thing.

She told me that she knew what I was saying, and life should be simple. It should be a person's _dreams_ that are all -grand, complicated. In typical Emu fashion, she then threw me a bluesky curve-ball, "When you were out there, fightin' all the Triffids and the cannibals, did you ever use a hockey stick?"

I was confused. I told her that all I ever had was my sword. Sometimes an unconvincing, 'Four Lions'-style toy gun, but never a hockey stick.

In truth, it was Emu who'd predominantly cared for me as I'd been delirious. A couple of hours in to my confinement, my muttering and shouting had eased into something approaching ordinary sleep. At which point Emu had also dozed off in the chair beside me.

She'd slept for hours. Eventually her attention was dragged round to the area of decking where my cot should be. Only in her dream, it was home to a dog's bed. There was Foggy, her childhood family dog, who'd been dead for at least twenty years. Obviously, she was overjoyed to see him, and immediately dropped to her knees to make a fuss of him. Except the little boxer was morose and sullen. The corners of his old, furry mouth were edged right down over his muzzle in an all-too-human frown.

On scouring around the ruffled fleece of his bed, Emu found a notepad and pen. It was surreal, it was bizarre, _but Foggy the Dog had done a childish little drawing._

"What's this? What's this, then?", Emu had asked, as if the little boxer could answer.

The higgledy, wavy little sketch was something which could -just about- have been physically achieved by a dog, if he'd had an unlimited amount of time to practice clasping the pen between his front paws, supported by his teeth. Still the image was strangely legible. A Christmas tree. Alongside was two bizarrely recognisable figures: Emu, complete with the damaged skull but smiling nonetheless, and myself, for some reason weilding a hockey stick.

"In a wa-aay, the act-ual surreal thing about it wasn't that Foggy had managed to do the drawing in the first place, but that he was now grumpy? And the picture was of us looking _happy_? It was like he was scared by the good feelins in the drawin'".

I flattered myself that, in her mind, maybe I was equated with the loyalty of a cherished family dog.

"What happened?"

"I just stoked him, and in the end he wagged his tail".

"Weird, but I suppose it's a happy ending".

Emu assumed a pleased expression. "Are we goin' to have this game of Scrabble?"

I helped her set up the game; the most important thing was getting the three high-powered table lights arrayed on the board in such a way that every square inch was alive with LED glare. Explaining her Triffid-afflicted vision, any far-sightedness was almost completely shot; her near-sightedness was not much better, though it improved dramatically if there were bright lights involved. Inevitably, without even knowing I was doing it, I found myself narrowing my eyes to try and imagine the world through her eyes. She laughed at me, told me it didn't work that way.

She hardly needed any time to compose her words; they weren't particularly complicated, either, but all too often she'd best my efforts by at least five or six points. Mysteriously pleasing to me, though, how good luck now seemed to be protecting her.

Now and again, there'd be a distraction, tho it never served to remove her thoughtful brown eyes from me or the table. Someone would drop a clattery bit of metal, spin shut a huge blast door or sound a hand-alarm - all just ambient sounds on a bite-size former warship. The narrow-yet-open-plan lower decks reverberated quite a bit when the engines purred and shut down for the night. We heard the anchor drag loose, causing the lights above Emu's wondrously smooth hair to ebb contentedly. Temporarily, without the light to carry on the game, we merely smiled at each other like knowing, super-intelligent teenagers.

And in the end, my getting beaten 160-199.

"I'll win next time", I said, as I headed towards the door, "I can assure you of that".

She smiled and let me go. I had no choice; overwhelmingly, there was just one thought in my head, 'When you're my girl, I'll give you the world'.

A non-health-and-safety protuberance from the valve wall made me curve my spine as I turned along the rubberised gantry. Weird echoes that consisted of several doppler effects all falling over each other guided my way, denoting how the ship was realigning itself to charge the turbines, the huge dynamos in the engine, so many valves being screeched shut. It was nowhere near as frightening as the earthquakes used to be. As you edged past the ridiculously constrained banks of machinery towards the largest radiance of sound, you'd inevitably find the put-upon Petty Officer tending his ship. I guessed, in theory, his original duty had been to assume a kind of gentle, martial law over the passengers, tho now he was fully occupied by maintenance.

It wasn't like the films, anyway. I passed a little anteroom and saw a man expertly stapling the hem of some trousers. A woman was scraping off a grill while watching TV. There would never be any big survivor-versus-survivor dramas like in 'Flight of the Phoenix' or 'Lifeboat'. Twenty-first century man was either a housewife or an administrator. Natural energy, 3D printing, new farming techniques -they granted the fundamentals of life so easily, if only people hadn't burned them all out on useless capitalist pursuits. In that dark little ship -it would never be my home- I saw how the problem had been accentuated into a dead society and a remainder of zombie day-dreamers.

And indeed, there was Keith and Wally passing a ring of heavy-duty outdoor Christmas lights onto the top deck, in readiness to clip them along the spurs and masts of the superstructure. Or, rather -they were thinking about it. I watched as the bigger man passed up a four-gang reel-socket, the U-battery, then the lights themselves. He stopped, mesmerised, staring at the heavy clump of un-illuminated bulbs. "This is crazy doing it now", in the darkness, his voice was picked out with a supernatural abruptness. "We'll do it in the morning".

And all at once, I thought, 'No. You won't'.

I waited for them to depart, then collected their gear. Retiring to an almost keel-level storeroom, I looked around to see what else was available. Gloves. Portable beacons. A futuristic welding mask. A force to be reckoned with, certainly, but still not enough: in order to fortify my legs, abdomen and the extremities of my leather jacket, I took the thickest wad of paper available (a hipster cookbook) and taped it around my body. With the huge bunch of Christmas lights slung across my torso like a fat bandido's bullets, I only felt faintly comical.

And then, like John Wayne, I waddled to the top deck and figured out how to release one of the lifeboats. It was a two-man job, but I somehow managed it on my lonesome. The splash, miraculously, woke no one, or if it did, no one came to confront me. Anyhow, when I was ready to be heard, there was a plan for that, too: I'd stolen one of the hand-held tannoy receivers and was constantly keeping an eye on the four lime-yellow lights which denoted range and signal strength.

I started to row away, but then stopped at around fifty metres. Removed from the combat insulation of the hull, its tight enclosure of ambient noise, the outside world presented an altogether more frightening audio. Two things: obviously, the sonar-twangs of the Triffids on the beach, combined with the roar of their fifty foot counterparts on the clifftop -which sounded, really, like a dozen ladders being extended and collapsed in quick succession. Equally, there was the sound of the lapping waves themselves. Normally a soothing sound, it had been adapted in my mind to represent something eerie, inexorable.

Behind the outline of the Saint Josephine, a post-sunset sheen clung low to the horizon, otherwise making for a completely grey world. Clusters of people emerged, responding to the squawk-pings I relayed onto the Tannoy, bodies only slightly more detailed than the drab sidings.

In my memory, I remember my speech as a complete hash, but people seem to like it. We'll go with the consensus, but all the same -Winston Churchill sleeps well.

I depressed the Tannoy handset, heard my voice come alive so many metres away, "Attention, passengers of the HMS Saint Josephine".

From the rail, to begin with, they simply glared at me. I saw Emu, but refused to luxuriate in the sight of her beautiful face. Of course, it was doubtful she could make out much of my figure against the crazy black sea. But my words? I tried to temper them with the same grace and open-heartedness she lived by, while behind me, the Triffids and Triffid-plusses yelped and bayed. Things weren't helped by the fact that my words, redirected through the distant speakers, sounded like an astronaut ennobling himself to Huston.

"Worried for me? From the First World War onwards, we've been told that death is the ultimate sacrifice, and noble. It's really not. Death is easy, and it's a sacrifice you only have to make once. To be the noblest person in the capitalist world we've just emerged from, you had to sacrifice yourself day after day, thanklessly, in manual work no one else wanted to do.

"Well it's a new world now.

"I don't believe in leaders. Half of the problems our society ever had was people trying to lead what couldn't be led. But God almighty, you people need one now, and I can't stand by and do nothing. I see two dozen smart, able-bodied people versus a _completely manageable threat"._

I lazily pointed to the landmass behind me without ever fully turning my back on the crew of the Saint Josephine.

"This? Is _your_ country. It's your chance to start again, as examples of everything sane, and strong, and fearless. And tell me it isn't worth it. Hands up anyone who used to actually enjoy being in a crowd. Anyone? We all of us secretly - _ached-_ to live in thinned-out society. And now? Nearby, there's a little country village that belongs solely to _us._ Tiny churches with stain glass windows, and you learn every name on every gravestone. Red phone boxes full of books. Pot Pourri-stinking pubs for men to grow old in. And the first time any of us even sets foot on a football pitch, or in a boxing ring, we'll be in contention to be champions of England, and f- Channel 4 televising it with a smarmy Australian and his two pet gonks.

"The Triffids are no more lethal than anything, and a hundred times less insidious than any Englishman of the last age, hiding behind his desk as if he wasn't perched on a hill of skeletons. I look at you and I see different people, but united by one thing: you're all equal, and free. Finally. All you've got to do is put that freedom into action.

"You can be ambitious, you can do anything you want, all with only two or three hours of the remainder of your time spent building a wall, or tending a garden, or looking after someone who's ill. Isn't that a bargain?"

To a man, they stared at me with a haunted expression. I wondered if they were staring ninety percent at the excitable wall of living plants. To be redressed.

"Don't believe me about the Triffids?

"Watch this".

I slid the welding mask over my face and initiated my tiny boat's motor. The cusp of the beach moved towards me at disconcerting speed now, brain working overtime at the exact dynamics. Milling Triffids weren't exactly locked on to the area where I'd make landfall, and actually it was a complete distraction to worry about their becoming co-ordinated. Let me be all-annihilating shock-and-awe or nothing at all. Unsheathing my sword, I repeatedly tapped the breadth against the metal speaker that was taped to my hip: We Will Rock You, obviously with no one clapping.

It bugs me sometimes. Should I have raised the sword over my head like Henry V, or would that have been a bit _too_ poncey?

Gouging pebbles, the keel bobbled about over the beach, already feverishly close among goon Triffids. The ugly, fuscia-veined marble of their ambulating flanks brought just one mescalined truth to my mind: I wanted to live. Whether in a dream or reality, it didn't matter, as long as the fabric of the cursed universe knew that it had met its match. No conscious thought was made about which creature I should attack first. I neatly impaled a relatively innocent creature, then swung low to slash a clicking, yelping wideboy. Successive moves were a lot tighter, controlled by springy, quivering muscles -apparently effective, tho. Long, alien-popping trunks slanted dying to one side, and I sensed them through the dreamlike air-pressure as much as saw them with my eyes. I made short, spurious progress towards my destination: a collapsed section of cliff face that would grant me a haunching ascent. A kick of adrenaline gave me an impressive few metres, plus five or six more creatures incapacitated. There was something magical in the bullet-time pause as the venom tendrils were expelled, already arching towards my scuttling figure.

Because we were both at an impasse and staggering. It emphasised one thing: my progress and the progress of the human race would never be a victory per se. This demiurge universe wants to exploit our laziness, shame us into suicide; it's a fundamental constituent of reality that will always be there. Only it's a two-way street, my friend. The trap we're fighting against is lazy and suicidal in turn, and there's glory in knowing that.

On the ascent, across the bulbous rocks, there was a touch of Crouching Tiger balancing, even if it was all in my head. I saw the creatures slanting around my emergence point and felt confident I wouldn't be whipped down into a comatose heap. About the nearby fifty-footer?

I recalled the description of the old man on the rail track, no longer apocryphal; 'legs like coaches, the trunks like a tornado made solid'. It was all true -in their vicinity, you felt nothing but determination, to notice every little detail, to survive. Looking up from the base of the thing, I felt certain that here was a monstrous beanstalk reaching ever upwards to a dreamlike and abstract outer space. But never mind prosaic beauty. Before leaving the ship, I'd already electrical-taped the craw-side of a hammer into my left hand. Now, in just a few seconds clearance away from the baying Triffids, I did likewise with my right hand. The effect was like some Assassin's Creed gauntlets but with dangerously sharp hooks in the place of spring blades, and I was surprised at how well they latched on to the giant's side.

Biting the bullet, the climb was initiated, minus safety rope and minus sanity. Obviously, the motion was floundering and extremely ill-thought out, but I forced myself to feel something beyond the all-too-rational pulls of vertigo, nausea, dread. At approximately fifteen feet was the shaggy 'skirt' area which collected together the huge, strip-like legs, and this was like grappling the slow-moving pistons of a steam locomotive. I moved on to the main trunk area. It was sheer, but never vulnerable, not like flesh. To squint up at it from the ground, you'd have assumed the texture would be like some giant lengths of celery all fused together. Maybe. I suppose I shouldn't have cared what it felt like as long as my hammer craws stuck firm, making good traction. In a large part of my mind, however, a roaring, subtle daydream. Walking down a country lane with your dad, and you'd snap off a finger-size stalk of hogweed, and he'd warn you that sometimes there'd be an army of ants living inside. But there never was.

I climbed more than half way up the stem, further than I could possibly expect without some kind of accident. Tantalisingly close over the top of my head, the bulbous petals -on the fifty foot version, these were the exact size and shape of a 747 turbine- while below, a little scattering of regular-size Triffids were being well-dispersed by the jagged gait of King Kong's footsteps. Apparently it wasn't hurt by the puncture marks made my hammer craws, or at least no more disorientated than Judith Charmers being bitten by some midges while filming a holiday report in Kinlock Castle.

I tried to think of nothing, merely press on mechanically.

But inevitably, I thought of Emu.

I thought about England, and turning death into life, and Triffids mingling unchallenged around Karl Marx' grave in Highgate Cemetary -hope forever being such a joyously sillyboy daydream. It was snowing, quite fiercely. At the slippery-raw junction near the uppermost 'mouth', I decided to cut my losses and initiate the final stage. If ever anyone had a vertigo nightmare about being way up high and constantly precarious, this was it -I could envision no future that didn't involve my being dead on the ground, soon. In the meantime, plunging a strut straight through a jaw-like section of rind (it _must_ have felt that), threading the first of the Christmas bulbs -I proceeded to creep back down on a descent route that curved tightly around the vase-shape torso. It was fairly easy to plant each successive bulb a foot or so apart; at least, it never once tried to bronco me clear. Maybe, for a giant Triffid, this was nothing more than mild acupuncture?

I reached the shaggy 'hip' area of one of its colossal legs, but still couldn't afford to drop clear yet. I fumbled with the graphenex battery, then clipped fast the boost connectors. The lights came on. I flipped the other connector and attached the MP3 player to the speaker.

The music began.

Letting the hammers carry the bulk of my weight, I took a few more measured swoops, then dropped clear onto the ruddy ground. I fled past the listless and defeated man-size models, back to the lifeboat, arching my way around to face my compatriots on the Saint Josephine -as that weirdly nuanced pop hit started to weave its magic. Noddy Holder's festive warcry more compelling than anything _I_ could ever say.

Ten metres out, a man I hadn't been introduced to yet got to work with an old style camera, and this I found faintly annoying. But then I thawed slightly: certainly he was capturing every clumsy preparation I was making to re-board the cruiser, but also, just across my shoulder -

I'll admit, the Christmas-illuminated monster was more powerful a sight than I'd imagined. Mesmeric-moving greens, and reds, and blues were endlessly blasting us.

"Did you really have to do all that just to make your point?", asked Emu.

"You can't have Christmas without a tree".

"Enjoy it while you can", she rippled her beautiful, tight jaw into a smile. I sensed the pronouncement coming. "January first, it's all coming down".


End file.
